


Psychopath

by shez_writer



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Blood and Violence, Child Harry Potter, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Family Issues, Genre-bending, Gore, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Inspired by American Psycho, Inspired by Dexter, It's a story about a psychopath, Messy human beings, Meta, Minor Bellatrix Black Lestrange/Tom Riddle | Voldemort, Minor Hermione Granger/Viktor Krum, Mystery, Other sensitive themes not mentioned in tags, POV Tom Riddle, Psychological Drama, Psychological Horror, Psychopath Tom Riddle, Sex, Step-Sibling Incest, There is a love story in here somewhere, Tom breaks the fourth wall, it deals with gnarly topics, younger brother Tom
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2020-10-06 17:16:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 41,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20510627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shez_writer/pseuds/shez_writer
Summary: Modern stepsibling AU. ‘Tom Riddle’ is a believable character, designed with the customary tensions of a young man navigating the modern world.





	1. Chapter 1

It’s Friday night. His match is in fifteen minutes but he’s stalling in the locker rooms, listening to his sister’s—sorry, _stepsister_, semantics are important— horrendously cheery voicemail for the third time:

_If you’re hearing this I’m probably in the lab where I don’t get reception— or in the bathroom … so just leave a message, and I’ll get right back to you when I can!_

Fingers curl at his sides.

“It’s me. Hope you’re alright… I know you’re busy but I was hoping we could talk. Call me when you get this, ok? Miss you.”

_Miss you_—it sounds ludicrous leaving his mouth. It should’ve been a joke. All it needs is a _sweetheart _at the end for eye-rolling incredulity. He should’ve just said _answer your goddamn phone_. But it’s too late to take it back, so he hangs up and focuses on wrapping gauze around his quivering fingers. The air stinks of booze and a musky egg odor while the single fluorescent light overhead wavers, an opaque sun beating against his sleepless eyes. The sounds are just as cliché: buzzing gnats, a painstakingly slow faucet drip, copulating pants from the streaming porno on his miniature TV. He stands and raises his arms over his head to pull on the muscles of his abdomen. Pops a few punches in the air.

He’s out of pills. Ran out just this morning and there’s a _tick-tick-tick_ beneath his skin, a frenetic energy—hunger’s not the right word for it, neither is lust. It’s an alive thing that bulges from his thoughts like an uncomfortable mass of flesh <strike>either tumor or erection he isn’t sure</strike> It makes words ram into the cage of his jaw, makes him feel ineloquent. Eloquence is a gentleman’s tranquilizer, Father used to say Pacification can be made criminally easy with pretty words—People are more likely to follow an eloquent man than a savage <strike>though every man must know how to be both.</strike>

‘Tom Riddle’ is a believable character, designed with the customary tensions of a young man navigating the modern world. He enjoys football, video games, and some third conventional male thing. He is twenty-five years old. He has a girlfriend named Bella who is a decent lay. He is a semi-professional boxer neither poor nor good enough to be distinguished. Being excellent at something is risky. Father said that people preferred their idols—barring Jesus—flawed and undivine. Distinctly Human. Since conception Tom has strived to incorporate these words into his personality with little success. Books, movies, pornos: He has found there is no comfort in the media that he consumes voraciously, because there is no narrative which suits him, from which he can steal.

For most of his life, Tom has been religiously careful about his substance intake. During his brief stint at Yale, he went through a stream of reckless doctors who provided him with all sorts of unusual-sounding candies: Zyprexa, Seroquel, Risperdal, Fluoxetine. Ruined his sleep, killed his libido, made the days without their centers. Following his expulsion for reasons that are still unclear to him, and are far too clear to his sister, he was given more and more until he stopped taking them altogether. All except for one.

Flash forward and eyes stare down between the bright yellow lines, avoiding the obscenities, the triggers. Big-tittied blondes with painted faces, holding gaudy posters plastered with his name. Flanked by guards, he is secured safely through the crowd, hoodie pulled over his face to prevent the lights blinking from all directions from dizzying him.

“What took so long?” Coach says. Tom climbs into the ring, slinking onto his stool. “Pre-match jitters? You don’t get those anymore.”

“Headache,” he lies.

A look crosses Coach’s face as he moves to kneel. He plants two hands on Tom’s knees, leaning in real close, about to drop a platitude, one of those _‘you’ve got nothing to be nervous about, kid’._ He pauses. “Check out your next paycheck.” Instead, he nods toward the bald, tattooed fighter climbing into the ring from the opposite side. “Now say _Thank you, Coach._”

Mordred “Dread” Patti. Not the most skilled boxer but great for drawing a crowd. Unlike Tom who the network has branded a _fragile white boy,_ Dread looks the part of a scummy fighter: fissured mouth, beady eyes, a face dusted over with a cragged beard. Outside this, he’s a set of limbs attached to a body made of flesh and steroids. He is Goliath. People cheer for him, bet on him. Bet against him. They yearn to see him fall.

“Thanks Coach.”

“You’re welcome. Now stop kissing my ass.” Coach shoves his shoulder in a way that Tom has learned through keen observation means camaraderie. “Watch for his uppercuts. He’s got a new plate installed in his knuckles. It’ll hurt like a bitch.”

Speaking of. “Seen Hermione around tonight?”

“Nah. Knew you’d ask though. Sent my boys looking for her earlier.”

“You—” Coach shoves the mouthpiece into his mouth before he can finish hissing. He spits it out, sputtering angrily, and watches Coach act too busy drawing heavy gloves onto his taped hands to pay his temper any attention. This isn’t the first time he’s treated Tom like a petulant child.

“Don’t sweat it—probably forgot you were fighting tonight. Sisters, you know?”

“Hermione doesn’t forget things.”

“What?”

“Forget it.” Standing, yanking the towel off his neck, Tom hurls it at the stool in muted fury.

“Good talk.” Coach nods, eyes glazed. “Now get out there—” a shove “and keep it smart with that left jab, alright? It’ll set off all your other moves.”

Staggering forward two steps, Tom turns and sends one last glower. Coach flips a finger —another endearment— before ducking out of the ring and out of sight. 

Tom’s hands are twitching inside his gloves—It's a mistake for him to be here tonight. He knew this before he left his apartment. He is out of pills.

Dread swaggers over, so that they’re standing face to face: His eyes are bright, face wide in a manic grin. Tom cannot manage a single facial expression in retaliation. Dread is one of the stupid few who innately believes in this brawling performance, whereas Tom has always understood that they are playing roles. His body, in its delicate, much smaller form, serves as a spectacle—food and circus for the masses.

  
Without his pills, the match feels like a psychedelic dream. His blood is pulsing. His head is throbbing. White flashes like strobe lights as imaginary wires shoot from the ends of the ring, rising to startling length all around him and Dread, curling together to trap them a cage-like construction. The ceiling dissolves, inky black bleeding into the steely portrait of grey. His muscles cramp with exhaustion but he doesn’t care. He feels so high even if his face is arranged to not give away any inkling of excitement— he cannot show that he enjoys this as much as he does.

The match is over and Tom is still bouncing around like he needs to piss. He stares down at the beaten man, at the beads of sweat rolling off Mordred’s skin, bloodied face, the vague expression of – what, dread? – in the swollen eyes. There’s something poetic about instilling dread in Dread. It scratches an itch. The violent flash of a second passes and he is ruminating over what it’d be like to go the whole way. All it would take is one screwdriver punch into the chest, really, really hard, straight into Dread’s heart. He would be dead in five, ten seconds max. This is not the first time Tom has thought about killing someone.

The voice of the announcer snaps him from this macabre fantasy. He finds Coach standing in the ring, lifting his arm in the air, making the crowd cheer harder. It’s white noise. It means nothing, much like everything else. He blinks and stares blankly, breathing hard, staring at himself in the golden reflective gleam of his trophy, his body glistening with sweat under the bright lights. He cannot remember what happened or feel happy that he won, all he can do is admonish that his sister didn’t come to see his match.

It’s a pity, because he would’ve loved to rub his victory in her face.


	2. Chapter 2

Becoming "Tom Riddle" has been a lifelong project.

An unfinished project.

Ivy League school dropout, to a novice sportsman, to yet another directionless cockroach urban-dweller. A young man you'll likely miss if you blink.

Tom never thought he'd be a boxer, much less enjoy it. There was a time in life where all he wanted to do was be like Father, who'd been a very famous scientist. His sister is also a scientist. Specifically, she is a medical researcher. And Tom...

Well, he might just be her favorite experiment.

The night is dark, opaque, uncaring. City lights bustle like the flickering of gnats, and Tom's sitting in a nondescript bar, celebrating his victory with Coach and the boxer boys, listening to incoherent snippets of conversations between heavy bouts of drinking.

"Nice match, gorgeous."

His eyes dart up. It's a woman. Of course it is. There's a very specific type of woman that approaches Tom late night in a bar. And that type stands leaning against the stool, her body arched with a deliberate languidness, her hair a glistening black and her lips painted red. She wears a shimmery skin-tight dress that leaves little to the imagination.

Tom sits quietly, staring into his glass, proferring nothing. He only vaguely remembers her from elsewhere…

"It's Pansy," she said, already exasperated with him. "We've met, what? At least _dozens of times _now."

Silence.

"At the cafe you visit every morning, luv. I'm the one who brings you eggs and asks if you want cream in your coffee."

"Right." Busy fishing a stray cigarette from his pockets; he lights it, and glances at the other end of the bar. His lack of pills makes him all the more agitated and he wants her to stop talking—wants her to fucking shut up. He morphs his expression into one of somber apology. "Sorry; didn't recognize you."

She lends a gracious smile. "You've had a long night, haven't you?"

"It's been alright."

"Just alright? Well then, anything I can do to help make it better?"

Her hand grazes his arm. Her smile grows wide, lips ruby-red and inviting. He can picture them around his—

Tom swallows.

Suddenly he's not feeling well.

The bar stool screeches as he stands, abruptly. "I have to go."

"Go? Go where?"

"I have to go return some cassettes."

Tom has no clue why he says this. It must be something he heard in a movie once.

He leaves the bar as if he's fleeing a fire, when really he's only fleeing himself. His mind spirals a thousand miles a second. The bitch. He reasons the bitch is irrelevant. She does not matter. She is a side-character in his eventual downfall. Would anyone _really_ care if he killed her? Strapped her to a board and sawed off her limbs, the way he's seen happen in illegal live streams that he's found way to hack on the dark web? He could just as easily slip poison into a proferred fruity margarita—if he was feeling kind or merciful. Or cautious. What was fulfilling about that? If she wasn't screaming for help, would Tom even enjoy it? Would his neighbors call the cops when they heard the noise? Would they break down the door and shoot him? Is that what Tom has wanted all along, his due penance? Some proof of justice. A diety.

Justice doesn't exist, Father used to say justice is a man-made concept meant to instill law in a lawless world—but it is a failed attempt. If justice did exist, Father said God too would exist and Tom would be dead. Yet Tom lives <strike>while Father is long dead</strike> which means God must be dead...and so Tom is left to his own devices. <strike>Why is Father dead?</strike> The pills?

He knows, in this small, violent, filthy, shameful, extremely high-functioning space of his mind that he's hidden from society, that it wouldn't take much to convince 'Pansy' or whatever the fuck her name <strike>he can't remember now he's already blotted her</strike> back to his apartment and do to her what she clearly wants him to do. And much more.

He is a handsome, athletic, young white man. While he cannot truly comprehend who he is, he takes cue from the wealth of media he has consumed—the archetypes and stereotypes and one-dimensional delusions of society. He has seen enough badly-written movies to know that his character is 'troubled' or 'brooding'. The byronic hero, the damaged love interest to some naive young bitch.

He can do anything he wants, to _any woman at all._

He can escape punishment all too easily.

Which is the problem.

Footsteps slosh over slick, muddied pavement, entering the giant building complex. Mania feels heavy in his gut. His legs became rubber, bending pliantly under his weight as he takes flight up a never-ending stairway to his apartment.

The lock click echoes through the small flat.

He locks it once, twice, _thrice_.

He scurries down the dimly lit hallway. His bedroom is breathlessly cold; the streetlight shining pale from the open window, casting long, shifting shadows. He sets down at the edge of his bed, shoulders tight and shaking. Yanks his phone from trouser pocket and rings a familiar number.

His sister.

"Pick up," he says, waiting out the rings. "I don't feel well right now. I've run out of pills. I, um, met a woman that I wanted to—" Breaking off, he swallows a tight breath. "I wanted to bring her back. I wanted to tie her up and take a knife and – do sick, horrible things. I—"

"Hello? Tom?" comes her urgent tone. "Oh god—where are you right now?"

"Back at my apartment." He draws a breath. "Alone. I need more pills. I'm out."

"Christ, Tom," Her voice is shaky, on the edge of a sob. "You're going to kill yourself."

His eyes close flinchingly.

"Try to get some sleep. I'll call you in the morning." His sister's voice has gone soft, loving—it's a liar's voice.

He shakes his head, infuriated, again and again.

"Can I come over? I don't think I should be alone right now."

A long, cautious pause.

"Is Krum there?" he asks.

Krum. A blandly successful rugby player with bad teeth, old money, and what Tom, in his mind, has reasoned is a nonexistent libido. He is her sister's newly-wed. 

"No, he's at the —listen, I just don't know if you coming over is a good idea. Victor will, well, I don't think he'd like you seeing me. Not this late at night."

Her words, the implication made by the _not this late at night_, suffocates. He squeezes his eyes.

"I see." His voice goes cold, numb.

"Tom—"

"No, forget it, never talk to me again," he snaps. "Go to hell." And hangs up.

It takes thirty seconds for the phone to ring again. He squeezes his fists once, twice, against his thighs. Exhales sharply. Then answers.

"What?" he barks.

"Just let me _finish_," comes her whine.

She's pleading. It's that voice he's always hated. He hates when adults whine. He rather they scream or cry. His sister is a grown woman, three years older, but it takes so little to reduce her to a child. Tom knows he's inside her head, but he can't bring himself to care. If this is what it takes to get a response from her…

He can hear her suppress a sob. For a second it makes him flinch. He is torn between comforting her, how brotherly protocol might dictate, or relishing in this small victory. Secretly, he loves that he can make her cry so easily. Every time Tom has ended up in the hospital, from Father's punishments or fights he picked at school or at university, Hermione has shown up, with an ugly, blotchy, tear-stained face and a mountain of tupperware, determined to feed him back to health.

"I know you're on edge. I know you need someone but tonight…tonight's just not a good night for me, Tom.

He sits upright. "Why?" he says, and grows frustrated at her subsequent pause. "Tell me already, goddammit, I'm your brother!"

The crackle of a held breath. He can hear her seething. "You're a brat, you know that?… We can't be family only when it's convenient for you," she throws in his face. It's brutal when she does this. He's never liked this version of Hermione, the one that goes shrill and says honest things and refuses to give him first priority in her life. Even though he knows, from all the shitty TV sitcoms and teen novels, that sisters are _supposed_ to be like this.

The line vibrates from their mutual breathing. She's quiet. He's quiet too, listening to her ragged, static-y sounds. He knows she's feeling apologetic; she'll cave if he softens just a little.

"Where are you right now?" he says, dropping his voice a decibel, so that he sounds low, husky. "I'm tired. I want to come over."

"Tom, no! I—I'm heading down to the lab again." He can hear her impatient feet shuffling across the tiled floors of her hospital. "I've got my hands on the perfect heart. It's so beautiful…plump veins …. I have to focus… No distractions… not tonight. I'm close, so, so close."

His sister is a surgeon.

And if she's Dr. Frankenstein, then what does that make Tom?

Hermione Riddle has great skill at medicine

But while she is gifted, she is well aware her brother—stepbrother, though it doesn't matter, family has nothing to do with blood, it's a _state of mind_—her little brother is smarter than her. When they were teens this made her jealous. Since then she's tried to make peace with it. It's not Tom's fault he's criminally intelligent. Of course, her little brother doesn't understand how dangerous this makes him and that, on the eve of his 18th birthday, when the final bell tolled in their parent's apartment, and lightning flashed outside the curtains—Hermione saw everything

The bloodied body of his father. Three puncture wounds, she counted. Two through the skull and one through the abdomen. She was the one who held Tom's panicked face between her soft hands, and took the blade from his hands, and kissed his brow and dragged him to the city, far, far, away, before he could realize what he'd done.

The elder sister has always fulfilled her role. She's taken care of Tom. She's the one who came up with the special pills. _Take these._ _Blend in. Act normal. Don't let them suspect. _She's taught herself all the necessary biochemistry and pharmacology, to cope with the precarious nature of her sibling.

But is Hermione really coping? On the exterior she looks fine. She has a career in something she is very passionate about. She is married to a rich and benign—Tom might call him _bland_—man. Which means she will never want for money. She blames _her_ ditzy, poverty-ridden, wayward mother for instilling the need for financial security in her. Just like she blames _his_ now-dead father, for never getting younger Tom the proper help. And she blames both parents for putting her and Tom together, and obliging her to love Tom. Hermione is a creature of solitary habits, too introverted for a sibling, much less a husband. She wants to live in her laboratory, in the world of her little science experiments. Often she has just wished she was alone.

But life has burdened her with another human to take care of—there's no way out.

It's nothing to do with blood.

Family is a state of _mind_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The cassette line is from American Psycho, a movie Tom has likely seen. 
> 
> Let me know what you think! Thoughts, character analyses, predictions, etc...


	3. Chapter 3

Every morning Tom walks to the same café, sits at the exact same table, and orders the exact same thing. He prefers all things to be done with the same systemic ease and efficiency. Repetition, habits are important for normalcy—maintaining the illusion of it.

"Hello handsome," he hears a cool female voice, like he does every morning. "What can I get you?"

Handsome. Gorgeous. Bastard. Sick Fuck. The spectrum of nicknames thrown his way. Offering little in way of an upward glance, Tom gives his usual order—egg whites and coffee—while scrolling the day's news on his phone. He is, of course, reading for violent crimes, obituaries, articles that provide gratuitous imagery. He is hungry, always for the wrong thing. Browsing the news is something he can do in public thankfully.

Tom is versed in the law to know what he can or cannot be caught doing. Unlike those late-night webcams he hacks to watch— broadcasting heinous crimes that lead to obituaries, reading the news is fine. As long as Tom himself is not responsible for a murder he's found no reason he can't enjoy the work of others with similar...proclivities, even if that should require him to use a private VPN.

Tom is well-versed in technology too. During his time at Yale he befriended those with similar thoughts who showed him how to evade detection. This has allowed dark queries into the ugliest, vilest corners of the internet. Tom knows he is not unique in the world. Those like him exist, but only in the fringes. They're not fictional characters. They do not plot world domination. Their evil is smaller, more contained. They come in all colors, shapes, and ethnicities. Some are 'handsome' too - a mask that provides an easier route to seduction, abduction, and etc. Others are less good-looking and must work harder. They are real but unlike him they are ineloquent. They act freely. They have no means to sedation. No pills.

They are barbaric like Father had been.

<strike>Whatever happened to Father?</strike>

Finally, proffering an upward glance, Tom notes one key difference about the cafe this morning.

The flirtatious waitress. This one is not the one that hit on him last night. Pansy whatshername. This one is different. New.

Disinterested, he turns back down to his phone.

A fist is slamming into Tom's face before he's even finished climbing into the ring.

He tastes blood pooling in his mouth.

Turning his head he grins, baring teeth at his assailant.

"Bit slow this morning, Tommy," the fellow boxer—Malfoy—pants, his feet bouncing, his eyes narrowed in determination.

All too eager for this fight, Tom dodges the next fist and comes up with his own; for a brief instant, Malfoy's cerulean blue eyes widen as Tom manages to throw his head forward and slam it into Malfoy's.

They stumble apart for a brief second to catch their breaths.

"Against the rules, fucker," Malfoy growls, spitting a wallop of blood.

"No rules," Tom says. Lunges in fierce with his right hook. "Fight to the death. Makes it more fun."

"The fuck is wrong with you," Malfoy pants, incredulous, narrowly dodging the blow to his face.

Boxing isn't meant to be a brawl or a street fight. There are rules to reduce chance of serious injury to fellow boxers, but today Tom can't seem to remember them.

Stars burst in his vision at the next hit but he shakes them off, shakes his muscles loose, and blindingly throws a sloppy punch.

Malfoy steps back, evading the blow. "That it?" he crows. Tom growls and throws himself at the boxer, changing direction at the last minute, throwing his body weight behind the fist that edges closer to his face; it hits Malfoy's jaw with such force blood pools out of his mouth. Pain, likely enormous pain, erupts from the point of impact.

Malfoy's howl is glorious to his ears.

Tom draws his fist back again and it ploughs into the stomach next; it's like hitting a train head on. He imagines Malfoy's guts smashed together, blood vessels bursting. He can picture the fellow boxer's death so beautifully, so vividly, so viscerally —it's practically pornographic. He continues battering the boxer until he falls to the floor, and his face is fully bloodied, and his eyes are drawn wide in terror, his chest rising and sinking with each shallow breath he draws in, as though praying it will not be his last—

Then comes Malfoy's divine intervention.

"Stop—stop—break it up!"

Tom has his left arm—fierce left hook— forcibly gripped. He's yanked off the injured boxer, sent stumbling across the ring where he grips onto the ropes and leans against them, catching his breath.

Coach stands there, Malfoy's lolling head at his shoulder, holding the injured boxer's semi-conscious form up.

"Go take a rest, Tom," he says, emphatically.

"I'm fine."

"I said _go_."

Tom feels reprimanded. Like an overgrown child. Throwing his towel over his shoulder, he stalks to the locker rooms and slumps onto a bench, sweat slicking down the trained muscles of his arms and his abdominals. His eyes sting with hot moisture. He sits there, squeezing his fists against his thighs, seething from behind the cage of his teeth.

Minutes later Coach finds him and sidles next to him, in his casually charming way, so that they're shoulder to shoulder. A gesture of male camaraderie that Tom's not in the mood to indulge. The older man begins the unwanted conversation with—

"That move to the spine—You could've paralyzed him. You know better."

"Do I?"

Tom watches those grey brows raise.

"Son," Coach starts, concerned.

What he should say next is '_get psychiatric help'_

Or '_I'm calling the cops you sick freak'_

Coach won't though. He lets it go. Always has and always will. He has the power to pull the trigger on all this—all of Tom—and he won't. Society is easily controlled by aesthetics and Tom is white and good-looking. Which means he's great at bringing in a crowd, no matter how many times he slips and breaks others and breaks himself in the process too. Coach—a Puerto Rican immigrant—has dollar signs in his eyes. Who is exploiting who? Is complacency as bad as the crime itself? Will Coach be implicated in his eventual downfall?

Coach takes a rag to Tom's sweaty brow. "You disappeared last night, buddy. How come?"

"I was tired." Tom puts no effort into this lie.

Coach doesn't need it. All too ready to provide Tom with an alibi, he probes, "Went home with someone?" Coach is all smiles now, trying to be friendly. "Getting it in are ya? 'Bout time. Saw that pretty red number flirting with you. Waitress at the Sunbird's café, isn't she?"

Tom offers neither denial nor confirmation. There is no need to let anyone know he spent half the night screaming at his unruly sister on the phone, then the second half siphoning though internet streams of humans dismembering other humans, hours and hours of sinful searching, all to find the one video that hits his sweet spot _just _right. He rather Coach believe what he wants to believe.

"Next match in a week," Coach continues, sliding a wad of cash into his shorts pocket. "Think you'll make it kid?"

Tom removes the wad, flicks his fingers across the edges, noting its sparseness.

"How much?"

"Week's worth of rent, I bet."

Tom's mouth upturns slightly. "My rent isn't much apparently."

"Not with that shit hole you call an apartment, it's not." Coach grins, as if relieved to see a shade of humor, of warmth, in him. Most people are. "But you'll be here won't you?"

"Only if it's interesting."

"Yeah, well I'll try to find someone that doesn't bore you," Coach says, giving him a friendly shoulder shove off the bench. "Now get the fuck out of my arena."

His sister's sitting hunched at her desk when he enters the room.

It's poor form but perfectly in-character that she's still in her pajamas—knickers and long tee and abominably ugly pink slippers. Tom knows she hasn't brushed her teeth yet. In one of those moods where she can't spare anything a second because there's an idea pressing far too insistently inside her brain.

"You should have knocked," she drones, bleary eyes glued to her notes. "...I could have been naked." 

They haven't seen each other in ages, and the nonchalance of this comment gets under Tom's skin. She manages to rile him before they've even had a proper conversation.

"Does _Krum_ ever knock?"

"He's my husband," she yawns, still without looking up. "He's allowed to see me naked."

"So am I," he murmurs, walking over and pressing up behind her. He leans, dangling his head over her shoulder, surveying her work—surgical schematics—plans and theories and research and documentation—knowledge that will end up in textbooks someday. His sister, the savant. The virgin.

She leans against his body, as if by instinct. He presses a hard-edged kiss to her temple, chuckling softly, and feels her stiffen.

"No," she says, this time firmly, turning to glare at him. "You're not allowed. You're my brother. _You_ knock."

"We can't be family only when it's convenient for you."

It's a game of ball. He's thrown it – her words – back, to maim and hurt. It has the desired effect. He watches pain and disappointment wash down her tired, delicate features.

"Nothing about being your family has ever been convenient for me," she whispers.

A low blow. _You've made my life hell, _is what she's really aching to say. _Then__ take a gun and blast my brains out, _he wants to throw back. But that is more than a sibling conversation, so it's not a conversation they'll ever have. At least, not with words. To have it would mean the end.

Tom wanders her room, yanking open her messy drawers one by one. Until, at last, he finds the blue pills he's so desperately sought for half a week. He pockets the orange medicine bottle and heads for the door.

"Leaving so soon?" her voice calls, scornful.

Hand on knob, he halts. Turns and meets her eyes with a bloodshot glare.

"Then beg me to stay," he orders.

Her face softens, the hostility melting. "I'm begging." She gently pats the edge of her bed.

Placated, he strides over, sinks into the designated spot and watches her chair swivel toward him. Facing him now, her fingers crawl under his shirt as she searches his torso for bruises.

"So what happened last night?"

"Usual," he murmurs, already annoyed by her clinical nature. He hates being inspected like one of her patients. "Don't look at me like that—I didn't kill the dumb bitch, if _that's_ who you're so concerned about."

"Don't call women—" She stops, her hand taut at his chest. His sister, the feminist. Protector of all dumb bitches in the world.

Her fingers continue their slow, arduous trace of his skin, taking note of his discomfort. He squirms and flinches in all the right places, and she observes how his muscles are remarkably stiff.

"You've bruised your clavicle…"

"I feel fine."

"Well you _shouldn't_ feel fine," she huffs, and swivels away, "It should heal fine on its own, but I'll write you a prescription for some ointment..."

His mouth twitches. "Just what I need. More drugs in my head."

"It's for the discomfort," she says, matter-of-fact, scribbling a doctor's note. "Shouldn't affect your head at all."

"I can find hallucinogens on my own, don't worry."

The pen halts, her shoulders tensing. The chair swivels back at him and then she's glaring, from behind her puffy, sleep-worn eyes.

"Don't give me more reason to worry for you," she accuses.

He smiles. "How else do I keep your attention."

"Try not being a fuck up for a change," she says, more out of instinct than anything. Her fingers slip back inside his shirt, continuing her inspection, feeling out his ribcage. "You've lost weight since last I saw you."

"I'm on a cut. Trying to get my cheekbones to pop."

"They pop enough," she drones, tired. "You're almost underweight, Tom. How much more handsome have you got to be?"

"How much do I have to pay for unsolicited groping and criticism," he says, sharply. "Because I'm certain I can't afford your prices."

Her brow creases but she's far too used to his insolence to be genuinely bothered.

"You should be grateful you've got a family member in the medical field."

"I wonder how Krum manages your astronomical ego," he hisses back. "Probably got to fuck you with his eyes closed…if he fucks you at all."

More than a simple jab at her sex life, Tom knows this will get under her skin. His sister is smart, accomplished...but she is homely and awkward and not attractive in the slightest. She lives in her little projects, finds fulfillment in the dead bodies she harvests organs from and run experiments on in the hospital's morgue. She is fascinated by dead men. She has no interest in _living ones._

Before Krum there was one boyfriend by the name of Ron, a fellow medical student, a meek boy who is the highlight of her sexual life—sloppy kisses and groping in the back of a van. Tom is certain she's never properly consummated with Krum either. It's a pity, he thinks, that his sister will only ever know mediocre sex. That said, it's her own damn fault.

"He might be gay, you know," he offers the cruel remark, just as she's folding a bandage around his wrist bone.

Her sister pauses and stares at him, as if he's just grown a second head.

"Krum," he continues. "Probably why he's never around. Always with his boys. S'why he won't touch you either." With a cursory glance over her chest, he adds, "Not that there's anything to touch."

Hermione maintains a wounded, withering stare.

"How do you know..." Her face takes on all the stages of grief at once, denial about her marriage, anger, depression, and finally…. It all clicking together. She is quiet, contemplative, before offering a resolute: "I wouldn't care if he was."

"Really?" Tom asks, brows raised.

He watches her draw a calm, steadying breath.

"I don't need _anyone_ to touch me," she says, wrapping the gauze around his skin tightly, once, twice. "I don't want—I'm self-sufficient. Fine on my own. I've always been."

With the emphasis placed on 'anyone', and the steel-clad fingers she's gripping _his_ wounded wrist with, Tom is certain he knows what she means. She's dropped vague hints their entire life. He's not a fool. But she'll never say it. "Doesn't sound fine. Sounds like daddy issues, Hermione."

"Don't psycho-analyze, you're not the one who went to medical school," she says, angrily. "As a matter of fact, a psychiatrist is what _you_ need."

He raises his shoulders in a shrug.

"Or a guillotine," he says.

Her face falls.

Suicide jokes are in poor taste today, evidently. Though, his sister's got no sense of humor for homicide ones either. She really doesn't appreciate his humor at all.

She looks shattered at his 'guillotine' remark.

"We need to figure this out, Tom," she whispers, fearfully. "You being like this...Pills can't be a permanent solution."

"I can turn myself in. Have them castrate me. Before I rape and murder a bitch."

"Stop it."

"You'd visit me in prison, wouldn't you? Slide me tupperware through the bars."

Her face crumples. She slumps forward, as if utterly defeated, tears streaming freely down her cheeks.

"You're horrible," she croaks, and then with a sudden lunge forward, her arms are wrapped around his shoulders in a tight embrace. He can hear her crying softly against him. "I'll hate you if you put me through that."

Tom shifts in his spot, uncomfortable. 'Utter revulsion' and '_go to fucking hell_' and 'weeping sordidly into his shirt' go hand in hand when it comes to his sister. He tactfully peels her off, holding her at rigid distance with the full of length of his arms.

Maneuvering a new subject, he nods over at the notes and diagrams set atop her desk.

"What're those?"

Hermione draws a deep, gut-wrenching breath. She sniffles, wiping her eyes with her fingers.

"I've...I've been working on a new project," she says between childish sobs.

He leans in, arms on his knees, and with a patient smile, says, "Tell me about it."

His sister hesitates, adjusting to this shift of conversation. She exists in a strange internal world, much like Tom himself. It takes her a moment to realize that not everyone functions at the same pace or is familiar with the same details she is.

"I'm working on a theory. I want to see if an artificial heart transplant is workable." Awkwardly, she paws at her desk, grabbing a paper. She holds it up. "First you have to remove the old one. You'd make an incision...cut this artery here and this one here. It's only a theory..." she says weakly, wiping her eyes again. "Maybe after some animal trials..."

Wrenching the paper from her fingers, Tom grips onto her wrists, and watches her lower half squirm. He forcibly brings her hands to his chest.

"Show me where you'd slice into me."

The request makes her flinch.

"Hypothetically," he says.

She traces her steady—surgical—fingers over the fabric of his shirt as if they were a scalpel. This touch is not clinical but delicate, caressing almost, as if grasping for something not there.

"There," she whispers, finishing the imaginary incision. She meets his eyes with a shy, watery smile. "What d'you think?"

"Clever."

He returns the smile. His is brighter, more attractive, obviously, and symmetrical—but his does not reach his eyes. She must know it cannot. She must know it's not real. And perhaps this knowing is what pains her.

Tom feels the strangest pang of annoyance. His sister has provided a real smile. Rare thing. And while he cannot comprehend it—is incapable—he feels he must give something of equal value in turn.

It strikes him.

"When I die, I want you to carve out my heart and keep it in a jar," he offers. "Deal?"

The good moment is gone. Her eyes widen in revulsion.

"What the hell is _wrong_ with you?"

He dodges the hand that abruptly comes to smack his forehead.

"Joke." Though it's not a joke, not really, more a looming eventuality, but there's no need to spoil their ending. So he presses a kiss to the edge of her mouth and says, "Now I'll be off."

Hermione slumps back in her chair, fingers lingering at the skin where he has imprinted the rare offering.

She blinks excessively.

"Where..." she begins, a little breathless, a little pink. She clears her throat. "Where are you going now Tom?"

"Church."

"Confession?"

He shrugs a shoulder, nonchalant. "Might as well try."

_Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned._

He sits in the small box room. There is no priest on the other side. Tom hates priests, for the same reason Tom has always hated his Father. He prefers these moments to be fatherless. This is a pragmatic summit, a meeting of negotiations.

"I've been thinking..." Tom starts, pensive, gathering his thoughts. "I've no clue if you're real. I don't know why I care either. If you are, I'm upset at you for making me this way…"

Tom trails off and screws his face in concentration. Trying to cry. Trying to summon the motivation from the deep recesses within him to feign remorse. He read in a book somewhere that God really appreciates this particular emotion.

But of course, Tom can't find 'remorse'.

Doesn't even know how to fake it.

Which is a pity.

He settles on being blunt.

"I know you were probably expecting me to kill a dumb bitch by now," he says, conversationally. "Well I haven't. I'm on my pills again. So I really don't think I have to go to hell. Second, I'm trying to be nice to my sister again. She makes my pills after all. No I'm not going to rape her. I think I can manage that much. Third, I've come to church— Doesn't all this make me a good person?"

The question hangs in the cold, damning air.

Tom rolls his eyes.

"More silent treatment then," he sighs. "You're just like my actual dad, you know. Anyway, see you. Same time, next week."

He finds his sister waiting on a bench outside, hands folded in her lap, looking awkward among the churchgoers. She did not feel comfortable entering the holy building. Church is an unusual place for adults that never came as children. Their parents did not teach them about God—they only taught them about demons. Church is a habit Tom has adopted only recently. He's no clue if it means anything at all. All he knows is habits are important for sedation.

"All forgiven?" Hermione asks, busy wiping her eyes after what has likely been another round of crying.

"God's still deliberating. Said he'd get back to me."

His sister gives a tearful laugh, lightening a bit as she stands up, and he wryly wraps an arm around her shoulder as they walk down the street, stride in stride.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've raised the rating of the fic to E with this chapter and added tags for violence, blood, and gore. Don't read if those things bother you.

_"Oh Tom."_

The wanton pant comes desperate, _aching, _beneath him, long, feminine legs wrapped around his torso tightly like boa constrictors.

Her knuckles clasp at his hair, gripping tightly. He gives a roll of the hips, causing a _yelp, _watching her head loll back, eyes straining closed. He reads the barest of emotions on her face, in the thrumming of her pulse where his fingers squeeze her wrist.

"Don't stop. _Please_."

As her whining continues, Tom wishes he could. He's been at this for several minutes and boredom—aggravation—is throbbing dully through his skull. Sex is a degrading practice as is, but the bad dialogue always runs a jolt of cold through him, bringing him to the verge of losing his erection.

Lowering his head between her breasts, he concentrates on breathing through his enunciated thrusts.

"Harder. _Harder_."

Her large, fleshy breasts slap against his face, determined to suffocate. Tom knows there are more ridiculous ways to die than by the stupidly, comically loud porno noises of Bella, but he might take anything at this point. She is _that_ horribly grating to his ears.

"Fuck me, Tom"—he winces, her fingers pulling painfully at his hair— "Fuck me!"

He can scarcely breathe.

That does it. 

He slaps a firm hand over her mouth. 

"Shut up," he says, sharp and cutting, bringing his thrusts to a swift halt. "I want quiet—I can't finish if you keep talking."

"Then fuck me _harder_." She bites at his palm, wriggling her hips insistently. "Be _meaner_. Make me _hurt_."

It's from the position of superiority—and total dominance—that Tom glares down at his girlfriend cruelly. He's a sculpture, perfectly tousled, frozen in this cold moment. The lamplight casts a shadow in all the right spaces on his face. It illuminates the slim V of his torso—the result of long hours spent in mindless, laborious physical conditioning. Society is more forgiving of a beautiful man than an ugly one, and Tom maintains immaculate deception. He knows well that he is every woman's fantasy.

'Tom Riddle' is a fantasy.

The muscles of his arms clench and relax as he finally lets her go. His abdominals tense as he pulls out of her.

"We're done," he says, with a tone of finality.

"No—!" she squeals out.

Exasperated again, he tightens his hand over her mouth. It takes every ounce of self-control not to slide that hand down, grip her slim throat, and asphyxiate. Watch the light flit those pretty mascara-and-tear-stained eyes. Or would he want to make her suffering last? Surely he would want to punish Bella. She is filthy, her behavior depraved and wanton. She is stupid, to expect him to indulge this stupid torture fantasy of hers, when he could easily make it a reality. Tom must exercise incredible, incredible self-control not to harm his girlfriend. She is lucky he's on his pills.

He shifts off. Swinging his legs over the bed frame, he yanks open one of his messy drawers, pulls out a stray cigarette, lights it, and sits at the edge of his bed, facing away from her, seething from behind his teeth.

When he finally turns, Bella's staring at him in stunned disbelief.

"You're too loud," he offers the criticism, blunt and nonchalant. "It ruins my immersion. I want you to stop."

He watches her kohl-black eyes fill with tears.

"I thought you liked loud," she whispers, looking fragile and small, bunching the blanket over her bare legs. "The girls in those videos you watch are always screaming."

Sure they are—but Bella has never actually _seen_ the content of these private videos Tom indulges in. They aren't screaming from anything fun.

"I don't want porn. I want real."

She gives a bark of laughter. "You want—real?" She sounds incredulous, or maybe she sounds bitter, as if he has said a horribly naive thing. "No you don't. You're not equipped to handle _real_."

"Why not," he snaps.

"_Real_ will never live up to your fantasies, sweetheart."

When the cold flush of anger hits, it stings. Though, he knows, Bella is right. Tom understands female anatomy—_If I do this, then that happens. If I touch her there, she'll respond by doing that_—but on the whole, this experience is lost on him. He has no appreciation for it. Outside the torture fantasies, outside the pornos. All his reality is informed by the media he consumes. The actions of others, never his own.

Bella doesn't know much about him—yet even _she_ can sort this out. It's unnerving, that she is not an idiot, but that she still hasn't left him, when she has had enough time to sense these fundamental gaps in him.

Which means there must be gaps in her too.

Bella lives in a fantasy world, where she genuinely believes that Tom will someday father her children. A criminal delusion that makes Tom's girlfriend just as dangerous as Tom. She's gone as far as forgetting to take birth control, which has led to Tom forcing plan B down her throat many times.

Bringing an unwanted child into the world is one of its gravest tragedies—and most unforgivable sins. It is one of the few things that can run a trill of horror up his spine—why risk conceiving another 'Tom Riddle'? What hope is there for the child when there is none for the father. 

"Who the hell made you _all this food_."

His girlfriend is drunk now. She is upset at him, and she is drunk, and he can hear her bleated hiccuping laugh as she wanders his apartment, digging through his things—digging through his fridge. It's in effort to avoid her that Tom lounges on his balcony, smoking out the last remnants of his cigarette, watching the sun dip below the horizon. By the time he returns, she's removed all the carefully-organized tupperware that lines his top shelf.

"My sister."

After their last encounter, Hermione came over and stacked his entire fridge with home-cooked meals; forever worried her brother wasn't eating enough. She is right. Tom is not anorexic, obviously, but he is obsessive enough about his physique for it to be considered a disorder. He keeps measurements of his waist, hips, chest, thighs, all his body parts. He tracks every meal, every calorie that he consumes—not a morsel passes his lips without planning.

True perfection is unattainable but the appearance of it depends upon covertly hiding one's weakness. And Tom is nothing if not appearances. In fact, that may be all that he is. He spends the next two minutes doing one hundred and fifty push-ups, then he writes this number in a neat little row in his journal, along with the calories of what he's consumed so far that day—only egg whites and coffee—and then he slinks into a high-chair across the counter from his girlfriend, watching her eagerly sift through the meals Hermione has prepared.

"What are you staring at."

Tom leans over the counter to fold a stray hair behind her ear. With a smile, he says, "My handiwork."

The tear-and-mascara stained face of Bella doesn't smile back.

She stabs a fork into a tub of hot noodles, ignoring him.

"Bella," he insists.

"_What._"

"Cm'here."

She swallows a mouthful of carbs, the space between her brows prickling—anxiety.

"I'm going to kiss you, cm'here," he repeats, swiping a tissue from a box and dabbing at her cheeks until he gets all her tears.

Her shoulders tense. She remains behind the counter, shoving more noodles into her mouth. She is right to distrust him.

Tom can be persuasive, and silver-tongued, and just when she thinks he will kiss her he might turn on her in a snap-second of wrath. Bella has learned that Tom can have a conversation with her in which she doesn't realize she isn't even talking. Tom doesn't just perform as himself. He plays everyone else on the stage, as well.

"Say that you love me," he orders.

"I love you," she echoes obediently.

But of course, the outcome desired is not the outcome achieved. Tom swallows, staring hard at the ground. His gaze scatters, mind engulfed in flames. _Nothing. Nothing at all._

He watches her twist a hand down her skin-tight blouse, to yank her bra back in place. It's as if she's trying to project some semblance of decency now.

Her eyes dwell on the tupperware she has splayed on the counter. "Your sister's an amazing cook," she says, with genuine affection, stirring the noodles in their fat-laden sauce. "Never knew you were so goddamned lucky."

Not a muscle on Tom's face shifts.

"Wish my sister cared half as much about me," she continues pathetically. "Hell, I'd even take a quarter… Cissy won't even return my calls. "

"Step-sister."

"What was that?"

Making no effort to repeat himself, to further clarify this strange point he seems to think—for whatever reason—needs clarification, Tom stalks to his closet. He reappears as he's drawing his arms through the sleeves of a starched white shirt. "You can leave," he decrees, halting in front of the wall mirror to do his buttons with an almost brutal efficiency, his mouth a thin line. "I'll call you when I want to see you again."

Tom is too busy staring at his own face in the mirror now to glance over at Bella. There is a lifeless, flinty quality to how he regards himself, an eerie blankness. His eyes are cold and dark but their pull is like gravity, and he blinks until he can make them brighten, light up in some artificial emotion. So preoccupied with himself, he cannot see the crushing disappointment set on Bella’s— she must know he won't indulge her prying.

"Can I take your sister's food with me at least?" he hears her plead. "Since you won't eat it anyway."

“Sure.”

It's late night by the time Tom finally gets rid of his girlfriend and has the privacy to go online.

Late nights have never been good for him.

He closes his windows and his blinds, and for the third or possibly fourth time ensures all the latches on his door are done. Then he sits down at his desk, turns on his laptop, plugs in his noise-cancelling headphones, and fires up a private browser called TOR. A blank screen pops up, demanding an access password, followed by several layers of file encryption that he must get through to make certain he has achieved an adequate level of security and anonymity.

He is hungry tonight, for the wrong thing.

After a long string of pauses, his screen flickers a little bit and, out of nowhere, his browser opens by itself. This time, a little chat box opens…

_Hello_

This has never happened before.

Tom stares at the screen for a couple seconds, unsure of what’s going on.

_I want to talk to you_

Tom has heard about AI programs that have all programmed responses to simulate conversation with people and if that's the case, then he's not impressed. This may be one nasty virus.

_You need to leave this network now. This is your last warning._

Hm. Maybe an automated security program designed to keep hackers out? Tom has to admit, he's impressed with it. He's never seen anything like this before.

_I'm telling you one last time. Leave now._

Unsure what compels him, Tom responds to the program.

**Or what?**

The next response runs a jolt of cold through him. The program begins listing information about him. His name, address, telephone number, credit card information. A hacker—his heart sinks in his chest. He can't move. He just sits there, fingers gripping the edge of his desk, paralyzed with tension. But what comes next is even worse.

_Don't look so confused._

His webcam light is on.

_You really shouldn't stare, [V0ld3m0rT], you might see something you regret._

_But then, this IS what you came looking for, isn't it?_

Suddenly, gruesome images flash on his screen. Images of disemboweled humans, human sacrifice, detached limbs, cannibals eating people, video clips of mass suicides and firing lines. The muscles in Tom's arms tense as he stares blankly, through his dark-rimmed, insomniatic eyes, while the flashing images are seared into his brain. He musters the control he has left and hits the power button on his computer and slams the screen shut.

He inhales. Exhales, a bit too harshly. Trying to compose himself.

"That's probably enough internet for today," he tries.

It doesn't work. The joke's in poor taste. Lands badly even with himself.

It takes twenty-minutes of madman pacing back and forth in his apartment until he's curious and agitated—enough to try again. It's an intimidation tactic, of that he's already certain. But why? 'Tom Riddle' moves through the world as if he were a shadow. A No-One, with no great fortune or assets. Why would someone—a stranger on the internet—choose to target him? There's no reason anyone should want anything to do with him. It's foolish, knowing what Tom is capable of.

Unless.

Hm, an interesting thought.

Unless this hacker is capable of _more_.

Morbid curiosity leaves Tom with no choice but to pursue further investigation. He grabs a prepackaged salad and a can of Coke—diet, of course, he's on a cut—from his fridge and turns his computer back on. He waits.

The screen flickers.

Without him doing anything, command prompt opens. But it's blank. No prompt or anything. Just that little black box with the white cursor flashing at him.

His webcam light turns on again.

Command prompt begins to type.

_What's the matter, [V0ld3m0rT]? Bad dream?_

_You're very handsome._

_The others that come on here don't normally look like you._

_Did you come looking for sex?_

Forking a bite of salad into his mouth, Tom chews thoughtfully. If not blackmail, could this be coercion? Tom is not shy about sex, nor is he a stranger to being propositioned by men and women alike. Normally he would just ignore such a seedy question. He tears a piece of colored tape from his stationary and smooths it over his webcam. Still curious, playing along, he types:

**Why, are you offering sex?**

_No_

_I am not attracted to_ _men._

_But I am interested in you._

_Fascinated, one might say._

_You see...I_ _believe that I can provide...a different sort of satisfaction...to people like you._

**People like me?**

_Let me rephrase._

_People like us._

Taking a gulp of his soda, Tom stares at the screen. Slowly coming to terms with the fact that he is speaking to another 'him'.

Curiosity at an unprecedented high, he types:

**Why** **threaten me.**

_I wanted to see what you'd do._

_If you'd run away or if you'd come back..._

_You came back._

**I don't appreciate paltry intimidation tactics.**

**What's your name?**

_Friends_ _call me Grindelwald._

_I think you and I can be friends._

_I want to send you something_ _[V0ld3m0rT]_...

_A link to a passion project of mine…_

_Interested?_

**Will this link get me arrested?**

_What a stupid question._

_Does it matter, if it satisfies you?_

Seconds later, the link pops up. It's a random jumble of letters with a dot-onion domain. Tom has no idea what's in it, where it leads. It's a risk, trusting a stranger on the internet, but Tom has taken similar risks before and not been arrested. He clicks it.

His screen goes blank.

Adjusting back in his chair, he gives a sharp exhale, drumming his fingers at the end of his table as he watches the screen change to show letters. He's witnessed these sort of steams numerous times, is all too familiar with bright red screens flashing big bold black letters.

This is a red room.

The letters to this particular room say "Deathly Hallows"

Underneath, is a list of IP addresses. Beside each one are the words "permitted" or "banned." Tom assumes some people abused their privilege on this site or possibly tried to hack it. 'Grindelwald' is tracking the people that watch him.

There's a chatbox at the very bottom. It's filling with the usernames of other spectators, the cockroaches, bottom feeders— _gutter rats_ of society—

More 'hims'.

Less intelligent, less attractive ‘hims’.

Then the live stream begins. Tom takes a deep breath.

A video camera moves through a dark, likely abandoned, hospital room.

A women who is obviously sedated is lying in what looks like a dentist chair. She is in a blue hospital gown. Her wrists and ankles are strapped down. Two people, dressed in doctor scrubs and masks, stand at her sides, injecting her in the arm with needles.

Messages start popping up on the chat box. One user types '_I want to see an amputation of the arm please!' _Another says '_Drill her head open and pull her skin down over her face.'_ Another user wants a complete organ dissection. Another wants to witness murder-then-rape. The one after: rape-then-murder. More users type in foreign languages that Tom can't understand. He doesn't care.

His focus is centralized on the whimpering woman, strapped to the chair. Young, maybe twenty years old. A college student then. Likely abducted piss drunk at a party. It's beautiful, the muted terror in her wide, bloodshot eyes. She has no idea where she is. He's enraptured by her labored breathing—They have her heavily drugged. Ketamine? Or perhaps Rohypnol? It may even be a hypnotic.

Tom has seen live streams before, but the victims have never felt this real or palpable. Most of the time they are puppets or computer programs. It's difficult to run an operation this high-quality and illegal without detection—which makes this 'Grindelwald' an unusually sophisticated criminal. Intriguing. Tom has also never typed a request, has never interacted with the 'hims' on the other end. Such an act could put him in direct danger. So he sits watching in mute fascination.

He leans in, staring intently, as the owner of the livestream finally enters the camera.

This must be 'Grindelwald'. In the flesh, he is as much a cipher. Stocky, medium-build man, face obscured by the hoodie he's wearing. He doesn't speak— which makes it impossible to discern anything else about him. No age, skin color, or nationality.

A complete cipher, then. 

'Grindelwald' carries an array of toys that he, with gloved hands, splays out on the table in front of the woman. It is with theatrical slowness that he does so, one by one, building viewer—Tom's—suspense. Hammers. Surgical tools. Cranium drills. Bone saws. Rib knives. All types of cutting and dissecting instruments.

Tom feels a familiar, dreaded pang of excitement. He draws a shivery inhale. As if to will himself to calm down. He feels far too high, far too alive. He knows what happens next. He—

No.

His shaking, jittery fingers dig through his desk drawer, scrounging for his pill bottle. When he finds it, he twists off the lid, and swallows the pill dry. The choking glide down his throat is painful.

Good.

This pain is good. 

It's well-deserved.

He squeezes his eyes and waits. For the even keel of sedation. For the familiar wash of numbness to drag his mind back into complacency.

When he opens his eyes, he does not look at the screen, though he knows what is happening. He hears a _whrrrrrrrrrr_—noise of an industrial drill tearing into flesh, the loud, _guttural_ screams of the woman—

Tom clicks his headset off.

He won't look at the screen.

He won't.

Really, he _won't_.

Somehow, his attention falls onto a photo that is laying under the pill bottle in his drawer. He brushes the bottle aside with his thumb.

It's of his sister.

Not lewd, like the material he keeps of other women, with their legs splayed open and phallic parts stuffed in their mouths. In fact he's not even sure why he has this. Hermione's frizzy curls fall over her shoulders, and she's wearing a green turtleneck sweater underneath her white doctor's coat. She's smiling; it's awkward and small and not the most attractive smile. But it's _real_.

For one bleak, helpless moment Tom finds himself staring at this picture. As if willing his sister to look away from him.

There is a _tick-tick-tick_ inside—an inevitability to the nervous bleeding in his brain. It's always the idle habits you acquire over time which you regret the most, Father said that Christ was not crucified—that he too was worn away by a minute ticking of little wheels. 

What to do?

A carefully cautious glance is cast upwards, at the woman on the muted screen. By now, smooth skin is torn muscle and flesh, as raw as any carcass at the butchers. Blood flows, thick and sluggish, from a slash across her gut, spilling out a nest of glistening red snakes. The toys are tainted of her essence. Her body blends into a blur of red-black-red, long limbs and youth and crushing innocence—and perhaps that is what causes the unbearable tension to swell within Tom's chest, a dense knot pressing tight against his wind pipe.

Grindelwald's victim is going to die because God is dead and there is no justice in the world and Tom <strike>will go to hell</strike> will sit here and watch <strike>whether or not God exists</strike> and it doesn't matter _it doesn't matter_ because _Tom_ exists even if _justice_ doesn't <strike>Father said</strike> and Tom—

And Tom what?

Tom exists, that is absolute.

Tom sees. He notices that there is still a flicker in the young woman's eyes, a faint light. 

She's not dead. Yet. 

'_Do you want the artery to be clamped off or do you want her to bleed out' _pops on the screen. A message from Grindelwald.

The chat box blows up with responses.

One spectator types '_No' _and another says '_Let her bleed out man, she's not gonna want to wake up after all of this.' _The other 'hims' are very casual about sending this woman to her impending death.

And Tom?

He's thinking at lowered efficiency. The pill has set in and the photo of Hermione burns in his skull. He closes his eyes and though he does not want to, he can still see her awkward little smile. Heavily sedated, and properly ruthlessly bold, he bares his teeth. His quivering fingers tap his first message into the chat box full of other 'hims'. A command, that will put him at enormous risk.

A direct challenge to this 'Grindelwald' whoever the fuck he may be.

He types the word:

**STOP**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tom-Hermione interaction next chapter!
> 
> Some things of note: 
> 
> Red rooms, like the one Tom visits here, are an internet myth. They are basically streams where people can watch live murders. It's possible they existed at some point? Or still do? Somewhere in the buried trenches of the internet. I don't know, I haven't researched much into it. But to me they just felt like the sort of thing real world psychopaths would try to seek out. I apologize if it just sounds like made up nonsense.
> 
> I added tags for blood/gore/violence but I also feel compelled to say that this fic will NOT feature any graphic rape. It may be implied or talked about in dialogue but it won't be given gratuitous, tasteless detail. 
> 
> Lastly, I'm fairly new to the Tomione fandom, and after reading popular stuff here on AOO, I'm fully expecting no one to stick with this fic lol. If you do end up enjoying it, I hope you'll chime in from time to time to let me know what you think!


	5. Chapter 5

Some say surgeons are no different from gods. They have extraordinary authority over lives. The power to save them.

And the opposite.

"Forceps," Dr. Hermione Riddle intones to the standing nurse through the fabric of her surgical mask. She's in scrubs, at the operating table, surrounded by a crowd of hospital staff watching her conduct open heart surgery. Problem of the day: _Valve stenosis._

Classical music, a hollow, background melody, echoes though the large, dimmed chamber. Low casual chatter rings, fellow staff making their ritual exchange of inquiries into each other's weekends, but Hermione is deep inside her head, where she pictures, with gorgeous clear-cut precision, the slick red pathway she must slice to heal this heart.

"How was your weekend Hermione?" Her anesthesiologist Amos Diggory makes banal conversation while he's checking the monitor.

"Scissors," she says, eyes trained on the open bloodied ribcage, half listening. "It was nice. Viktor and I went to brunch with family."

"Family? I didn't know you kept in touch with your family." Diggory maintains his reputation as a nosy old man.

Her steady hands freeze, for a small breath, delivering delicate snips to myocardium flesh. "_Viktor's_ family," she clarifies. "I don't really have anyone on my side — just Tom."

"The model?" So Diggory's seen the posters.

She resists an eye-roll. "He's actually a boxer." _Not that that's any more respectable. _"They advertise him on posters because it broadens their demographic." _It brings in women. _"Tom's their most profitable boxer." _He doesn't give a damn that they're basically prostituting him._ "His matches always get sold out." _Boxing's a stupid sport and I wish he'd quit._

"Aha, I see." Diggory's too old and benign to pick up on any of the subtext. "How's _Tom the boxer_ doing then?"

Though all too accustomed to standing long hours, Hermione fidgets her weight between her feet. Inquiries about her brother are a mental segue-way down a rabbit hole of unease.

"He's managing." She shoots a strained, _muted_, smile from behind her mask. "Still… figuring life stuff out. Has a girlfriend now." She makes a point to bring up Tom has a girlfriend every chance she gets. _He's met a girl called Bella. He takes her on frequent dates, and they're a very happy couple together. _It's important to help her brother maintain a steady, solid alibi in case—

Well, in case.

She makes an opening in the appendage of the left atrium and inserts a finger to palpate and explore the damaged mitral valve.

"Figuring things out is what your twenties are for, aren't they," Diggory reminisces, providing unasked-for commentary. "Trying new things. Finding love. Figuring out who you are."

Hermione scoffs. Evidently her brother is stuck in a coming-of-age novel.

"How much younger is he again?"

"Three years." Hermione presses her finger at the valve, causing blood to leak backward into the atrium, the leaflets bulging back. "We were eight and eleven when our parents married. Now we're twenty-five and twenty-eight. So he's not _that _much younger."

"A little brother is always a little brother," Diggory says, with a fond smile. "It's more a mental difference than a physical one really."

"Very mental," Hermione agrees, meaning something entirely different.

"Your brother went to school with you?"

"He dropped out."

"Why's that?"

Hermione stares at her red-soaked gloves. Of course, when one is the elder sister, work isn't the only time one is covered with blood. Not that her sibling remembers, or will ever be grateful. "School wasn't right for Tom," she lies.

More like: Tom wasn't right for Yale. Too clever and unorthodox and _unsafe_, really.

Why boxing? He could've been anyone or anything in the world, could've had any career, could've been a mathematician or a lawyer or a computer-scientist—and in a non-complimentary way, he even had the facets to eventually become a politician if he so chose...but these things, her brother has never felt a draw to—

"Tom likes trouble." Hermione staples along cut flesh, clamps the organ shut. Feels its glorious pulsing twitch beneath her fingers. "He gets a thrill out of picking fights…he was expelled."

"Oh?"

"Behavior issues," she admits, with an awkward twitch of the shoulders. "Runs in the parentage. His side, anyway. Tom's dad had issues too. Was a—" _monster_ "—drug addict. Used to beat—" _me _"—my mother."

When she looks up, the older colleague's staring at her in alarmed concern. "I know many psychiatrists I could refer, Hermione," he says, quietly. "There's no shame in seeking out help. You only have to ask..."

Hermione shakes her head. Smiling sadly.

"I'll be okay," she sighs, done being pried at. And returns to the live, throbbing organ on the table. "Life's got to get better eventually."

**STOP**

White. Loud. The word stares back at Tom.

The chat box has gone still.

A woman is slowly dying on the screen, her upper body curled inward on the shackled chair, like a butchered animal, in a waste of blood. Her ribcage has lost ediface. Her head droops forward and over her chest a great of mat of blood has spread like a bib. Tom can hear her ragged panting, the fear that these may be her last breaths.

He's been staring at her so long that he can't bear to look anymore.

The hooded figure stands at her side.

'Grindelwald'. When he finally speaks, the voice is heavy, every syllable laden with a thick, eastern european accent. He speaks with weight, with gravity, and with arrogance—he isn’t used to being questioned.

"And why would I _stop_?"

He quickly types:

**Eloquent men don't kill.**

"Eloquent men don't..." Grindelwald echoes, squinting as he reads the words off the screen. "And what do 'eloquent' men do—jerk off behind their keyboards? Turn your mic on, asshole. And your camera."

His fingers freeze, a chill crawling down his stomach. He leans back in his computer chair, eerily still. In calculation. Understanding the risk posed with revealing himself.

He retaliates:

**Take your hood off.**

The outline of Grindelwald's body morphs, acute angles falling obtuse. As if he is amused. Intrigued. Tom knows he’d be the same in his shoes. All games are played in pairs, and one bold move requires another.

It's with a theatrical slowness that Grindelwald raises his hands and pulls his hood back to reveal a carefully-styled blond head of hair—

A man. Disappointingly ordinary-looking.

He looks like a politician, which likely isn't far off the truth. People like Grindelwald hold office and run charities as shields for the activities they truly enjoy—they take perverse pleasure in attaining positions of public trust. Charming, socially intelligent, enough to know they don't need to play by the same rules as the rest of society. They have no remorse, no regrets... no restraints.

The most unsettling part of Grindelwald is his stare—though not intentionally piercing, his face somehow lacks the mobility normal people have. His eyes, wide with mania, stare directly into the camera, as if he is looking directly _at_ Tom.

"Your turn, stranger," he says, nonchalant.

Already Tom wants to slit his throat, for no reason other than Tom is always itching to kill someone at any given moment. But he cannot get ahead of himself. He must let things play out, with a young man’s naivety if necessary. He must let Grindelwald present him with a motive—a ruse.

Pushing away the ever-poignant fantasies of murder invading his brain, Tom calmly removes the tape from his webcam and clicks his mic on.

"Hello..." he clears his throat, speaking into his headset. Talking to someone on the internet for the first time is awkward, so he adds, "Nice perm."

There's a rumbling, a strange assortment of voices—there are other people in the background of 'Grindelwald'. It's possible he has an entire team, an entire secret organization devoted to this illegal fetish. Tom reasons his net worth must be monumental. The other 'hims' have fallen still behind their keyboards; they are listening in— discerning, deciphering this odd interaction.

Through the camera, Grindelwald is grinning broadly back at Tom. "You're very young, handsome stranger," he murmurs, sounding charmed. "What college campus are you speaking from? I'll find you by tomorrow. With a sharp, shiny present."

More paltry intimidation.

Tactically astute, Tom diverts the subject. "You lied to me," he says into the mic.

"What was that?"

"You said you weren't attracted to men," he reminds, blunt and dry. "But—with that perm, I'm certain you're gay."

Grindelwald's lip curls in offense. He stares at Tom, eyes growing sharp, the artificial nonchalance he managed a few seconds ago gone. "Making fun of my hair, are you?"

Tom slumps back in his computer chair, crossing his arms. He shrugs his shoulders. "I'm sharing my thoughts."

The strange angles of Grindelwald's face are turned ghoulish by the harsh light of the lamps; for a moment Tom thinks he must see what Hermione sees when she looks at him—a monster, an alien. A freak.

His voice is quiet, throaty. "Then I'm going to kill her."

Tom sits back up, alert.

He watches Grindelwald's long fingers drum along the table splayed with his toys; they curl around the hammer. One hard blow, that's all it would take to kill her.

Though the woman manages to lift her gaze to witness the weapon, she does not speak; no need to tell her not to fight, to make a sound. She sits there, as if stifling a scream; one threatening to unhinge her very jaw if a sound is to leave her lips. This is how she is to remain, silent. Taken. Silent. Die. Silent.

This is meant to be Tom's moment. He must to negotiate with this other 'him' and save this woman and—

And what?

Redeem himself? Make up for every bad thought he has ever had? Fix the wiring in his brain? That wouldn’t happen —but perhaps the wiring provides him an advantage here. Tom can understand the entity staring at him through the camera better than anyone else.

Now, to negotiate.

First thing, sex is off the table. Tom doesn't barter with his body. And he can't play on Grindelwald's feelings; there are none to be played upon. Which leaves money.

"I'll pay you," Tom interjects, reaching for his wallet and credit card. "Let her live and I'll make the transaction right now. Send me your paypal." A second later, he adds, "Joke. I know paypal isn't secure."

Grindelwald is looking like he doesn't appreciate the joke. However, he slowly edges the hammer away from the woman’s cranium.

"You don't have enough money to make a deal with someone like me... I've checked," he informs, tone light, brisk again, having discarded his previous anger; appearing to fluctuate between two irrational moods. "I know everything about you..._Tom Riddle."_

Quiet falls_. _

"How much," Tom repeats, intently, ignoring the deliberate reveal of his name to every single person on the stream. "I'll have it by the end of the week."

Grindelwald is now looking amused by his persistence. Clearly, this doesn't normally happen...

"You want to turn my little show into a ransom?” He stares directly into the webcam. “Well, well…Are the rest of you listening? It appears our new friend here wants to play white savior for this woman. One, it's either a perverted kink of his or two, he's trying to assuage a guilty conscience. Either way, it’s a _tremendous_ buzzkill." Grindelwald sends him a reproachful look through the webcam. "She's not going to fuck you for saving her, Tommy."

Fucking is the last thing on Tom's mind right now. It's not as if he has a shortage of willing participants in his life, so it's not about the woman in question at all—she could be anyone. She could even be a man. He doesn't care.

Tom's trying to make a point.

It’s okay if he doesn’t know _what_ this 'point' is yet. Because he knows he's doing the correct thing in the situation—he's seen a movie like this before with the exact same plot.

Tom Riddle’s going to save this dumb bitch. That’s what they do in the movies.

He hears a _ping! _Then more: _Ping, ping, ping! _Because this is an interactive livestream, the other 'hims' are filling the chat box with messages. They write 'this could be interesting' and 'find Tom and blow his brains out!' and 'kill him next' and 'tear his dick off and shove it up his ass'. Tom finds them so ineloquent and disappointing. They lack all originality to come up with a truly interesting design to murder.

"You know what—scrap it," Grindelwald interjects, reverting back to his old tone of airy deceptiveness. "Ransoms are inherently boring. I'm not interested in indulging one. I have a shiny new idea—ready?"

Tom watches him grip a gun from the table and ceremoniously raise it, point it at the woman's temple.

"No money, no stupid ransom." His tone is eerily pleasant, making the ferocity of his expression even more unnerving. "Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to shoot this bitch—and then I'm going to come find you, gorgeous Tom…and _I'm going to tear your throat off,"_ he ends in a harsh snarl.

The words creep over Tom's skin like wet cement. His room is colder than ever.

He draws his hoodie over his head, pulling it around his neck, and stares at his computer screen.

Grindelwald's grinning as if he's just said something incredibly witty. It's a mad maniacal grin, but also a deeply affectionate grin—the grin of someone who’s really happy because they think they’ve just made a new friend. "How does that plan sound?" he continues, pleasantly, as though he and Tom are making dinner plans.

Tom clears his throat.

"Well," he begins, politely. "I think it depends… on when you're coming over?"

"Oh don't worry, we can parse out the _details_ later."

A gunshot goes off.

So of course Grindelwald kills the woman.

No surprise to anyone at all.

The plot twist, however, it's that Tom's knowingly invited needless danger into his life. Grindelwald has all his personal information: address, medical history, credit card information….his cell phone number. What's more, he has a _vendetta_.

The next morning Tom’s at his gym, short-clad and hair slicked back and shoulders glistening in sweat, releasing his fury on a punching bag—_thud-thud-thud—_so much force in every harsh blow. His fists wallop at the bag as if he means to smash it into the very cement. He pretends it's the soft, pliable body of his brand-new friend who he doesn't just want dead; but wants obliterated, with nothing left to salvage.

Why?

Well, _why not._

Normal life doesn't present the proper avenues for violence. At long-last, Tom Riddle has found the something he has ached for his entire life—justifiable reason to kill someone. He has a _nemesis. _He's thrilled as he is fearful as he is stunned. He’s been fantasizing about murder in exquisite graphic detail all day. He won't let this glorious chance slip.

"Tom!"

A fellow boxer calls his name. Fischer, his brown muscles slick under the lights, swaggers into the lockers. He's got a sweatband and a tattoo of a Chinese dragon scorched over his chest. "Heard you beat the shit outta Malfoy the other day. That's_ savage— _wish I'd seen it."

Tom bears no memory of this match. Injuring Malfoy is so low on his list of priorities it's inconsequential. "I might have," is all he says, between swift, practiced punches.

Fischer slinks onto the bench across from him. "Oh you _did_. Malfoy hasn't been walking straight since he's come in. Hasn't been able to look anyone dead in the eye out of shame neither ...He's waddling like you tore the dick from between his legs. It's hilarious."

"Okay."

Tom is bored with locker room banter already. His mind is wandering to fantasies of murder again. Athletes, though excellent fodder, aren't interesting enough to keep his attention for too long. Luckily there's someone far more interesting paying him attention, and Tom would be lying if he wasn't feeling a thrill by the challenge he has been given. He feels like he's in a crime movie where he's playing the hero.

Playing.

As for the villain, could it be that Tom Riddle has finally met his match? Or at the very least—someone with the same hobbies. His message box is brimming full with texts from 'Gellert'— Tom has been receiving them from the murderer all through the night and well into the morning.

_Awake, [V0ld3m0rT]?_

_Can I call you Tom now._

_What about Tommy?_

**I don't care.**

_Or do you prefer handsome stranger?_

**Not that.**

_Too gay?_

_What are you wearing right now?_

_If I showed up at your doorstep today, how would you kill me?_

**I'd shoot you through the head.**

_How unoriginal._

**Today is too soon. I have work. I won't have time to come up with anything creative.**

_You should learn to kill within time constraints, Tom. It's a valuable skill. In real life, an adversary won't announce when they're coming over._

**A polite one would.**

**I would give a heads up.**

_How chivalrous._

_Wanna know how I'd kill you, Tom?_

**Go on.**

**And make it interesting.**

Gellert certainly makes it interesting.

It's late at night and his sister is in the basement of the hospital—the morgue—so lost in defiling yet another dead body that she doesn't even hear him enter.

He leans against the frame, his arms folded across his chest. "Forgot to knock," he says, with an insincere note of apology. His voice is slow, almost lazy. Deliberate. "Or ask if you were naked." He makes a point to let his eyes trail lingeringly down her long white coat. "Everything... _looks_ clothed to me."

He watches with great satisfaction as her eyes roll up to the heavens, wishing for patience or mercy or perhaps a conveniently timed lightning bolt.

"You're not allowed in," she intones, and then with a look his way, her eyes narrowing on the cigarette between his lips, she adds, "And you're definitely not allowed to do _that_ here."

Tom glances down at the cadaver on the operating table, releasing a cloud of smoke from the edge of his lips.

"He's already dead," he says, with the barest of shrugs. "He's not bothered."

"It's the principle of it, Tom. This is a hospital. With _sick_ people."

Two in the morning, and his head is throbbing from the sting of antiseptic in the air. What's more, Hermione has begun lecturing—trying to start a fight over _principles_.

Disinterested in allowing it to become a banal hour-long argument, Tom puts the cigarette out, and stands beside her, watching her nimble fingers carve a small triangle of flesh into the deceased.

"So what's wrong now?" she says, only bothering to engage him with half-hearted interest. "Break your tooth? Snap your dick? Out of pills already?"

"I just came to return your tupperware."

She shoots him the filthiest look imaginable.

"Joke," he says, flicking a mote of dust from her white coat.

"I know its a joke," she says, seething. "You have never _in your life_ returned my tupperware—" She stops, collects herself, fixing her stare back on her cadaver. "Go home, Tom. It's night and you look—"

"Handsome?" he says, smiling with teeth.

Tom knows he's flirting. He's done it before, with little thought. It's reckless and cruel, to play this game; to risk the permanent for the fleeting. But there's safety in his sister's unwillingness to reciprocate. She may be a bitch, but she is a rigid one, not a naive one.

"I was going to say you look exhausted," she responds, dryly, her gaze flickering over his face in that familiar mix of irritation and concern. "Christ—what did you stay up with so _late_ last night?"

"Video games."

She snorts.

"I did," he presses.

A video was involved. And a game is certainly being played.

"You don't play video games," she says, tracing her scalpel in deliberate design, down the center of the chest, through the breast bone. "The same way you don't watch football. Or like having to maintain a girlfriend. These are all things you say you do because you think you're _supposed_ to."

His sister's observational prowess is outstanding. Incisive. Vulgar. It makes the muscles in his jaw tighten, aggravated.

He replies in a slow, deliberate voice, "You think I'm pretending?"

Hermione looks at him, and she frowns in that pitying, adult way he hates so much.

"I think you've spent your whole life pretending...I'm not sure you know any better."

Tom feels as if his skin's peeling off. Stinging, strangely cold, as if he's standing there not only without his clothes, but also without the beauty of his carefully-constructed external appearance.

"And who do you want me to be," he prompts, annoyed.

She frowns, quietly, sewing one section of an artery around a tiny opening just below the blockage that likely killed the patient — in effort to preserve the heart. "It shouldn't matter what I want," she sighs. "I'm not you. I don't have to live in _your_ head."

"Pretend—Hermione—for a minute, that I might actually be interested in hearing what you think."

His sister sets down her instrument.

Tom watches her yank off one surgical glove.

Next, slowly, a small, bare hand rises through the air, coming to rest against his sharp, bruised cheek in odd affection. Warmth permeates Hermione's palm; She normally doesn't touch him like this.

"I love my brother," she whispers, smiling at him. "I love him _so_ much, and I just want him to get better. That's it. I promise."

Tom looks at the slate grey floor, the dove ceiling, anywhere but at her face. The air is stagnant like he has just gone in some pit. He feels as if he's had his marrow hollowed out.

"Anyway, you should leave now," she finishes, dropping the hand. "I'm busy and you're pissing me off."

He's in no mood to leave, to go home and be by himself. Not after the existential baggage thrown at him.

"What're you busy with tonight." He presses up behind her, leaning over her shoulder. His chest expands as he inhales, feeling the pressure of her spine against his ribs. "That transplant?"

He tilts his face close to hers, so he can watch her eyebrows twist in thought.

"I'm still collecting samples. I'm trying to remove this heart as cleanly as possible, all the valves and vessels intact so that I'll have a decent model to build my prototype—" she stops, suddenly aware of his intense closeness.

"Go on. I'm listening." He offers, at her cheek, his fingers delicately sliding over hers as she traces her scalpel over dead flesh. "Intently."

He watches her lips fall open. She can't stop the impulse to share her ideas with a willing ear. She gesticulates excitedly, describing some procedure Tom knows nothing about, and cares little about, while he stares down the thin line of her throat.

It's when she turns her head, that in her hurry her nose nudges up against his. He feels her hot breath on his, and he feels her quivering beneath the hand he places at her belly.

She jabs an elbow back into his ribs, and he grunts.

"Stand at a distance," she warns.

Ignoring the directive, he grips the scalpel, through her fingers, and guides it to the cadaver's neck. "Tell me," he murmurs into her curls, slicing through the jugular. "Why do you prefer the company of this dead man to your living brother?"

"Because he doesn't argue with me,_" _she says, taking the scalpel back. "He doesn't make my life harder—" His fingers circle her gloved wrist in retaliation. "—He doesn't give me a constant _throbbing_ headache—" His thumb presses the outline of her wedding ring beneath latex. "—He lays there and lets me do what I want with his body..."

The end of Tom's mouth curves.

"You're disgusting," she accuses. "Shut up."

"I haven't said anything."

"Stop _thinking_ it."

Tom hides his grin against her neck. "I wonder if Krum knows—" Imprinting one soft kiss into her skin, he feels her _openly_ _shudder _against him. "—that he's _clearly_ in over his head with you—"

An elbow jabs, hard and abrupt and _fierce_ into his stomach—

—Tom finally steps back.

She turns. Staring him down, through wet, hurt eyes, breathing harshly. Looking astounded. Betrayed.

The unsaid accusation makes his skin itch.

"You _reacted_,_"_ he says, his voice a low, rough vibration that she'll feel in her throat and chest. "It's your fault too."

Tom watches the outline of her mouth shake, as if from an earthquake beneath her flesh. Her body's gone rigid, her mind is scrambling to normalize—to minimize this moment.

"Then I'm sorry," she says, her voice strained. Her eyes flash with poorly-concealed hurt. "I want you to go home now. It's late and I don't want..."

"Don't want what?"

She won't say it.

"Go home."

Two hours later, cigarette smoke pollutes Tom's tiny bedroom.

He's shirtless, sprawled across his duvet in deep lethargy, listening to the mechanical swishing of the fan. His eyes flutter against the bleak intensity of the single bulb in the room.

_"Ah—ah—harder—harder!" _a woman's breathy voice cries out.

His hand is down his boxers, chasing release. He grunts in rhythm to the mewling, sex-sounds of the pixelated brunette on the laptop streaming porno. Knees to hard floor, getting it from behind. Tom doesn't have to look at the screen to know she's not comfortable in the slightest. His mind swaps reality for fiction, makes her a toy—rewrites the suffering as pleasure. There is plenty of paraphernalia to help with that. Is he even enjoying this? He doesn't want to be.

_…lets me do what I want with his body…_

_…your body…_

_…our bodies?…_

His sister has been reckless. Insinuating the impossible. A shrew, and a virgin, oblivious to how volatile anatomical reactions are. How inspiration can be simple or complex, wanted and unwanted. Mere words—a soft, warm hand at the face—can trigger a freight train of arousal, shoving Tom further and further to the chasm of unwanted fantasy.

Fucking his palm with reckless abandon, he tries to squash the filthy want, banish it—ejaculate—before it can become a horrible, shameful, and _lingering_ thing.

Gone, he decides post-orgasm. It's gone.

It's not.

Tom erases his browser search history, then stalks to the shower to furiously scrub himself. On his return to bed, he grabs a diet Coke from his fridge. He hasn't eaten anything else all day, but he doesn't care. If hunger is the disease, then perhaps starvation is the disinfectant and perhaps it will kill the rot inside him. He grabs his remote and clicks on the TV and starts his DVD player.

_Casablanca_. Tom's been told it's one of the greatest films ever made. He's yet to figure out why.

The beginning is a fugue—slow, colorless, out-dated dialogue—and he finds his hand drifting down his boxers out of boredom. Annoyed at once more falling prey to bodily weakness, he wonders if his sister is still angry at him. Hermione doesn't hold grudges for long. If she's reliable at anything, it's forgiving him in a timely and convenient manner.

Stroking himself with one hand, he grabs his phone with the other and sends a text.

**Hey, smart one.**

She's awake, clearly on her phone, because the response is instant.

_Why are you still up, Tom?_

Bossy, encroaching. But not mad.

Propping a pillow behind his head, he grunts.

**Masturbating.**

_Gross. Why did I ask?_

**No clue. **Not at all bothered by his sister's natural inclination of disgust toward him, his eyelids flicker with fatigue. **So does Krum snore?**

A short pause, then:

_Listen for yourself._

The next received text is an attachment, a sound clip—which when Tom clicks, plays the loud, thunderous roar of her husband breaking the sound barrier.

It dampens his erection slightly but it makes him laugh.

**That's miserable.**

_Don't remind me._

**You chose this man, Hermione. You have no one to blame but yourself.**

**You chose a gay man who snores.**

_My husband isn't gay, Tom._

Not this banal argument again.

It's an impressive feat of his sister's—virginity— that she can't see past the thinly-veiled shutters of her marriage. Or refuses. Tom, of course, had suspicions from the moment he met Viktor Krum, shook that large, rough, calloused hand with suspiciously manicured fingernails. Or was it the moment he was introduced to the sportsman's china collection? No... it was the moment Tom saw Krum's beard. That was the giveaway. Perfectly groomed, not a strand out of place. Immaculate. Only a gay man or a psychopath could ever maintain facial hair so well. And Hermione isn't stupid enough to fall for a psychopath.

One look at Krum's texts to his 'teammates' would hold the necessary evidence to assert Tom's claim, though he knows Hermione will never encroach that boundary.

She's only interested in encroaching boundaries with her brother.

Still vigorously stroking himself, he writes:

**Explain why your husband isn't fucking you right now, Hermione.**

Grunting, his ministrations speed up.

**Why he isn't holding your legs apart, his mouth hot on your soft, pink clit.**

**Have you ever even had a proper orgasm?**

His language—the ineloquent delivery, the question—startles her, he can tell. Unsubtle, unbrotherly. It’s not even flirtatious. It makes her combative.

_What the hell's wrong with you????_

_Sick bastard._

_I should block you._

**Go on then.**

Tom bites at his snarling lip, grunting, working himself with aggression. His sister won't block him. She loves him. Too, too much. She has confessed this herself.

_Why are you so obsessed with sex?_

He's trying to get off. That's not the point.

**Because I'm not dead yet, Hermione.**

_Well, I have better things to think about._

**Such as?**

_I_ _m just saying, my life doesn't revolve around doing the deed_**.**

'Doing the deed'. His sister, the virgin queen.

_And even if my husband was gay, I'd be okay with_ _it._

**You're ridiculous.**

_There's nothing wrong with someone being gay, Tom. You should broaden your horizons._

His sister—with her broadened horizons—has somehow missed the point of her own marriage. What's more, the conversation has killed his erection.

Glowering at his phone, Tom sends a **'k'**—rude, abrupt, dismissive—and ends the talk. He shifts his attention at the TV playing the scene of _Casablanca_ where the main leads finally come together, locking in a passionate kiss. Silhouettes swirl in a room of shadows, and Tom feels sordidly out of place. He can't get off to it, though still he watches. Props himself on his elbow, clicks his remotes, replays this scene near a dozen times, hard at scrutiny—trying to decipher the kiss. The act of a kiss is girlish, stupid, infantile, but there is something in the emotion 'love' that is beyond him. He doesn't even know how to fake it.

Agitated, Tom clicks the TV off. He twists into his covers, trying to sleep. It's near impossible. His shower-damp body, the wet towel on the floor, the smell of stale air and cigarettes, the room's equatorial warmth are all disablingly sensual. He wants to fuck, wants release, wants to _be inside—_

Facedown into his pillow, he groans.

His phone lights awake with a message on this side table, and fingers scramble to pick it up. His sister?

No. His new gay best friend.

_Awake, Tommy?_

_I'm bored._

_Let's kill something tonight._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know if you're shipping Tom/Hermione, wishing they learn to be decent siblings, or hoping one of them kills the other, lmao.
> 
> Not that it needs to be said, but things will only get more dysfunctional from here. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	6. Chapter 6

Like him Grindelwald is a man with unscrupulous interests. Like him he is also a chronic insomniac, and the messages ping one after the other through the dead of night, all with the tenacity of a drunken ex-girlfriend that Tom would surely like to kill.

_Hungry, gorgeous?_

_I bet you are._

_Well put the porn away, Tommy, because you know it's all FAKE, don't you? It won't fill that dark hole inside your chest._

_I have a REAL treat for you._

_Subway station on 8800 Willow Ave. You'll know when you see it._

_Bring your favorite knife._

.

_Don't worry, it's not me._

Raunchy theatricals aside— it's enough to pique his interest.

Warm, wet, smoky night; it makes the world feel melted, like a unfinished ice cream cone or another slick thing he might want to put his tongue on. Tom feels hungry for the vaguest inexplicable reason, as if he's been given too little skin and has too many teeth to bite back with.

He parks a block down and walks the distance. There's an impatience, a festering neurosis, to his demeanor. Grey hoodie hides dark hollows beneath his eyes which hang like battle wounds, black gloves conceal hands quivering with adrenaline— small cleaver, meat cutter, the handle remains tucked inconspicuously inside his belt.

A broad shouldered young man stalking streets as if he owns them sends a message.

Everyone, the pair of long-legged female joggers, the old man juggling groceries, the mother on her phone pushing along a stroller—

Everyone crosses to the other side of the road.

This response is instinctive. Tom knows it's called self-preservation. It means they comprehend that the danger threatening their existence is not war or famine or the supernatural; it is only a quiet, personal fear of running into someone like _him_.

In the daytime the subway station would be a seething mass of humanity, littered with people from every walk of life shoulder to shoulder, in each other's faces, no personal space; In the middle of the night it's a quiet, deserted vestibule fit for a crime.

It is pitch dark, outside the steady beam of phone light where Tom stands. Dark above, dark below and a tunnel of black. The air is just as stale and empty soda bottles clunk against his shoes, as stationary as the old train that sits with its doors open.

He squints through the doors but after a few steps inside he detects a repugnant smell, body odor, male definitely. Masked by a thin layer of cologne.

There it sits, his treat, whom Tom quickly profiles as a fairly athletic middle-aged white man. Though now he sits cowering, hidden in a row of seats near the very back of the compartment. 

The voice: “W-who are you?” Sounding panicked, frightened, guilty.

So very, very guilty. 

Tom stands quiet, shining his phone light, inspecting this man with raised brows. He had not expected dialogue. A part of him is disappointed, because he certainly would have prepared a dramatic speech if that were the case. The fact of the matter is Tom is too eager tonight to be bothered with aesthetics.

“Hello?” A different voice rings out from the darkness. Higher, a very young person’s. 

And that’s when a messy head surfaces from the seat next to the man. It's a child.

A child?

Man and child. The seedy situation throws Tom. He stares unblinkingly, as if trying to hash out the answer to two and two. But eventually, the numbers make 'four' in his mind again—a creeping sneer of disgust appears on his face as it clicks together, and _oh, _he finds the answer so very revolting.

"You. Cm'here," Tom commands the young boy, who hurries over at once. Then, eyes noting intently as the man sinks guiltily into the seat, he quietly asks, "Is this your father?"

The boy, who looks no older than five, anxiously rattles his head.

Tom's brows raise. "Do you know him at all?

This time slowly, almost fearful of the confession, the boy shakes his head.

Tom redirects his phone light and studies his eyes—bright green—and finds no redness, swelling, dilation, or any other signs of drugs. On the visible arms and knees of the boy, there is no scarring or indication of abuse. Unless the abuse is underneath the child's clothes. A terrifying thought—

"May I touch your head," he asks politely, and waits until he is granted permission—a small nod—to continue the inspection. He's seen Hermione do this more than enough times with blunt trauma victims. His fingers trace along the scalp, finding a small indentation in the back of the head, near the occipital bone. A blow, likely by a large object. The child has been injured, kidnapped, and was likely headed for abuse.

"He gave me candies," the child confesses, in a fearful whisper. "He said I wouldn’t feel anything. I didn't eat them though…I kept them under my tongue and spitted them out…they tasted really bad."

Ah yes.

The motive is all-too-evident.

Beautiful.

Glorious.

Gellert was right; this is a real treat.

Tom holds out his palm, and the silent authority of the gesture beckons the child to meekly drop the uneaten pills into his hand.

"Thank you." He pockets the pills, and crouches on his knees. Eye-level with the child now.

"And what's your name?" he says, his voice low and intent.

"Harry," the boy answers fearfully.

"Harry." Tom smiles, pleasant. Placating. "I want you to do something for me, Harry. I want you to go into—" He nods at the dim fluorescent bathroom stall sign outside the train "—and lock the door and wait until I come get you. Just be a few minutes." Reaching into his pocket, he removes a tangled pair of headphones and presses them to the boy’s hand with his phone. "Here. Listen to music while you wait."

Harry nods, his pursed mouth trembling, and quickly scurries away.

Running one hand over his already perfect hair and pressing his lips together, Tom stands to full height again, right in front of the man. Shoulders sharp, he tilts his head to the side, observing at the shrouded figure with a predatory gleam. He opens with a smirking drawl, a taunt:

“Little boys. _Really?_”

He listens to the pathetic cries of denial (_You__’ve got it wrong!_ _I swear I didn__’t do nothing yet!). _Oh, but you were going to weren’t you? If I hadn’t caught you. Tom hates the retort. It's just an excuse. I didn’t do nothing _yet. _As if the interruption of a crime is enough to absolve a crime itself. The chance of killing a potential pedophile sends a dark shiver down his spine. The catharsis will be unequivocal, on par with a long over-due therapy session. His face mirrors the grim expression he sees, but his insides are on fire, eager for a butchery where he doesn't have to hold back. Who will ever miss a child predator?

“You know.” Tom removes his cleaver, weighing the weapon in his hand, watching the man’s face morph to sheer horror. “I’m doing you a favor here… You get that, don’t you?”

The cleaver is no heavier than a kitchen blade but will cut on first contact, even with minimum pressure. Its serrations will be like waves, but not randomly like on those cheaper knives—this is Tom’s most expensive cooking utensil. It will slide in smoothly and do maximum damage on the way out, like the barbs of a fishing hook.

For some reason when Tom sees his reflection in the steel, his mind flicks away, his handsome face reminding him of his father’s. Tom can hear him now, the empty space in his mind where he belongs, the absence itself like a kind of memory. _You can do anything you want as long as you get **away** with it. _Father said morality was inherently flawed, it was only as staunch as the world would allow it to be, and the world outside their white-picket fence life was full of brutal people, the vilest sort of criminals.

Father forgot to mention he was one of them. 

_"Close your eyes son."_

_Shadows fell inside his room, and adult teeth shone like knives, the wooden bat outstretched in his hand._

_Hits came to his stomach swift, steadfast, methodical._

_Tom remembers his heart racing in violent excitement. By the end he remembers laying on the floor laughing—great big wheezes._

_He has no idea why he ever laughed. Father had a terrible sense of humor._

_Father was also a master at creating situations where Tom was forced to learn a skill or suffer grave consequence. Self-defense, for instance._

_"Fight against it—fight me!"_

_Large, barbarian fingers laced through Tom's hair, driving his skull into the pavement. He remembers the crystalline crunch of his bone. For an instance his eyes were pressed to the hard ground and he was lost in pain, and Father's arms plunged Tom's head underwater. His entry into liquid like a slap to newly birthed flesh; his eyes, already open, adjusted to the darkness. He was total, pure awareness, especially in those seconds before blackout._

_His father, above all, taught him rage._

When metal bites into wall, a rush of cloth warns Tom that his victim has hurled himself out of the cleaver's trajectory. 

Annoyed at this willful defiance, Tom glares coldly. "How dare you," he says without any inflection. 

The man's survival instinct has kicked in. Eyes narrowing, he lunges at Tom, tackling him with the force of a college football player, grabbing at his shoulders, shoving at him back fiercely.

A hard fist wallops at Tom's face.

Pain radiates from his face, the familiar sensation of a black eye, rendering him temporarily blind, followed by a blow to his gut. His body careens away from the force, and then his arm retaliates with a far more trained punch to the man's stomach. With his two hands he grasps the man's head and brings his knee cap up to the nose; there is the sound of a blunt _crack!_ and Tom releases the greasy-hair slicked head.

Blood rushes down the man's snarling face. 

Eyes narrowed, Tom steps back and pulls his cleaver from the wall, just as the man's unveiling a shiv from his jacket. 

The knife throw is easy to dodge. 

It's not until Tom feels the first real sight of harm coming to himself that his mind suddenly becomes very alert. The man makes a desperate scramble, grabs the knife and jabs it into Tom's thigh, fist tightening crudely, veins of his arm pulsing—and just as quickly, Tom buckles against the ground, panting.

Hot, searing pain rushes to his extremities. 

Snarling cruelly, Tom finds his rage, his stupid, unguided rage—he only comes to the realization then that he's clenching his hand as the cleaver swings. He's not a honed assassin, a novice at best—but he swings—slashes—eager to hit whatever part of the man's body that he can. This assailant is not inexperienced—the sudden vertigo of being flung back by the brutish arm leaves Tom toppling out of the halted train across a plain of cement.

Tom hears a snap—and if it's bone, he will never be sure...his knuckles are so very white—He stands and grabs the cleaver again—He swings—swings like he doesn't care if his rotary cuff permanently tears from the sheer force of it—The metal sounds with a resounding _crack!_ across the center of the rear of the man's head, so violently that Tom immediately feels his hands screaming in surprise at the sudden impact—the broken away wood of the handle clatters into the ground—the metal latches against skull—the man—crumbles, buckling like a curtain to the ground.

"Shut up!" Tom stabs at the loudly groaning man again...again...again. Until he can no longer be certain if he is doing so to ensure the man was dead or if he is simply taking out his spite...when his arms shake from the fall in adrenaline and his hands are no longer capable of holding onto his weapon...He drops the cleaver aside. 

It happens in a heartbeat, in the space between one breath and the next. Tom's hands move to cup the man's bloodied chin, to cradle the curve of his damaged skull, and he is surprised by how little effort it has taken to dispatch him.

A little squeeze of throat muscle and he will be dead.

Less trouble than peeling an orange.

His quavering fingers tighten, tighten, _tighten—_the breathing stops. It's beautiful. Profound, seeing light leave the man's eyes, a vindication Tom cannot even begin to comprehend, at least, not yet. It is euphoria beyond anything before, a heat soaring through his veins. In this rare golden moment he feels like a hero.

He feels _godly_. 

One minute the man was right in his face, more alive than he had probably ever been, and now...

Now he's meat on the floor.

Tom calmly brings the blade under his shirt, tucks it into the back of his Levi's.

At this unholy hour Hermione's curls are piled atop her head in a sloppy high-bun, and the hideous pink slippers on her feet drag along the cool wooden flooring of her kitchen.

She sets on the backwards chair across from him, legs sprawled in her familiar unlady-like way, and inspects his injured face with the clinical scrutiny she knows he hates.

"So you got robbed and the man ran away," she repeats dubiously, dabbing at the blood of his busted eye with a damp tissue. "What were you even doing out so late?"

"Grocery shopping." He winces as she applies stinging ointment to his lower lid.

Hermione stops, studies his face for a long moment, noting the tension in his jaw and the careful blankness behind his eyes.

The lie earns him a swift punch to his shoulder.

"I've seen the absolutely _pathetic_ state of your fridge," she snaps. "If you actually did your groceries, then I wouldn't have to worry about feeding you all the goddamn time, now would I?"

Ten minutes, Tom counts, for a throbbing headache to emerge. It takes ten minutes for him to regret coming to his sister's house. There's a blade-wound scorched in his thigh which requires medical attention and a dead body sitting in the trunk of his vehicle parked outside, yet it is Hermione's tendency to fixate on the completely _wrong _thing that pisses him off the most. 

His shoulders stiff, he reclines back, lights a cigarette.

"I haven't asked you to worry about me," he says, between puffs.

Hurt crawls over her small, sleep-worn features. 

She exhales, angry, and a flurry of small, ineffectual punches come at his chest, the fury of a girl eternally pissed at her brother.

"You—" One punch. "—know—" Two punch. "—it's not that—" Three punch. "—_easy_."

He grips her wrists as she goes in for the fourth, sliding and pressing his thumbs at her pulse, and holds her in stasis. "That'd be a foul in the ring," he informs, lip curling.

"We're not in the ring!" she riles back. "We're in _my_ goddamn house. And I'm not in the mood to have you sit here and blatantly _lie_ to me about—"

"May I have another sandwich please," Harry chirps, seated atop the high chair, fingers sticky with peanut butter and crumbs, observing on.

Freezing mid-fight, they both turn their heads to stare.

Hermione wrings her wrists back. "Sure you can, angel," she says, her voice pitching unnaturally high and cheery. "You can have anything you like."

She stands up to lift the young boy, playfully jostling him in her arms.

Tom observes from his chair, with raised brows, this strange performance that is his sister. She sets the child on the counter, kisses its cheek, and begins assembling the sandwich. She liberally and evenly spreads peanut butter across two slices of bread, adds a layer of sliced banana, and pours a tall, cool glass of milk. While the young boy eats quietly, she cleans his circular-framed glasses and fusses over his sticky hands. The finishing touch, she presses another doting kiss to the little bruising scar on his forehead. And then Tom gets it—this, like his kill, is also therapy. Hermione is playing the mother she never got to have. He already knows the next thing out of her mouth will be:

"All right, Tom. Get over here. Now your turn."

He laughs, breathless. Incredulous.

"My wounds run a bit deeper," he murmurs.

Some change in her posture (_the dip of her shoulders, the curl of her open hands_) gives an indication that she understands. Of course she does — they lived the same horrible childhood — but it's not a conversation for today. 

She tosses a dish rag at his head.

"Keep pressure on it."

Tom smooths out the fabric and wraps it around his aching thigh, pressing the flat of his arm to taper the bleeding. "I think the child's been hit on the back of his head. Can you tell if he's concussed?"

"He hasn't shown any signs but I'll take him in for a CT scan in the morning, just to be safe," she says. "We'll also have to contact the police."

"Don't!" the boy pipes, his eyes growing wide. "They'll send me back to my aunt and uncle! I don't wanna go back there! Please let me stay with you, Tom!"

Tom gives a blank stare.

"I'm sending you away in the morning," he affirms, irritably, with a silencing glare when the boy attempts to protest.

"Do you want a sandwich too? With milk?" Hermione asks, making her way back to him, face etched with concern.

Too many calories. His mind and stomach are at war; mind will reason he doesn't have time to burn them off. "Just some coffee," he says. "Black, no sugar. "

Hermione scrunches her nose. "I don't know when you developed the most austere habits about food."

"I'm just not hungry."

He feels the weight of her gaze sloping along his arms, where the majority of his musculature is focused, down the neat and rigid angles of his body, lingering at the narrow waist he has worked hard to maintain. She gives her own hidden meaning with her frown, a _you don't fool me_.

But before she can pick the argument, her husband enters the room.

Krum, of towering height and robust stature, looks freshly showered. His prickly-black hair is damp, his lower half is wrapped in a towel, and there is a mask of some green cream over his face. The sight terrifies Harry, who likely fathoms a swamp monster has emerged from nowhere.

"We have a kid now?" Krum says, with a good-natured laugh, rubbing at his wife's shoulders.

"No," Hermione murmurs, with a tone of disinterest. "Tom brought him."

"Tom has a kid?" Krum's grin broadens. "So I'm an uncle?"

"No, it's not his—" Hermione stops. And sighs. "Can you go wash off your face mask, sweetheart, you're frightening little Harry."

"Little Harry," Krum echoes fondly. He disappears, reappearing a minute later with a clean face and shirt on but the child is not any less terrified. Harry hobbles off his high chair and quickly gets behind Tom, who he's seemingly designated as his savior.

"Help!" Harry squeals.

"Go sit down," Tom commands, annoyed, and the child scampers back to the high chair.

He leans in, presses his fingers between his eyes, gives a sigh. "I need to figure out what to do with this loud, irritating thing."

Hermione picks the panicked child up in her arms and presses a flurry of soothing kisses to its cherub cheek. "He's not a _thing_," she says, with warm affection. "He's a lovely, little human _boy_. And he's grown attached to you…You saved his life."

"Completely unintentionally," Tom utters darkly.

He's a twenty-five-year old man and while it is unhealthy to possess lingering apathy for near every living creature on the planet, there is a safety to it. He is rational enough to know a child's safeguard is a job for social workers, child protective services, or those those who volunteer to be foster parents—Idiots with practiced empathy. Not those like him. He's never had an animal he didn't want to kill, let alone a child, and he can't bear to think what one may suffer under his guard. He's been so distant with near all creatures in his existence that very rarely has their suffering crawled into his psyche. 

"So what happened to you?"

Ignoring the nonchalance of this question, Tom sends a murky look at his sister's husband. It hasn't slipped his attention that the rugby-player stands five inches taller and weighs sixty pounds of additional muscle, and of course he has fantasized about killing Krum, choking him, shoving him down the stairs, ramming his head between a car door, but it is an impersonal fantasy, for he would likely want to kill anyone who married his sister.

"Tom got stabbed," Hermione answers, her fingers pressing along the bones of his knuckles, checking for breakage.

"You got into a fight?" Krum says, raising his thick brows. "Outside the ring? Did you at least win?"

"Of course," Tom says caustically. "I _always_ win," he makes a point to stress at the larger sportsman, though the hostility goes unrequited.

Krum, the supportive brother-in-law, gives a grin.

"No doubt you do." He places a hand at Tom's shoulder that gets angrily shrugged off, the hostility, again, unnoticed. "Saw that last match." Krum walks away, grabbing a protein shake from the fridge. "Our boy has the _fiercest_ left hook I've ever seen, Mione. Get him started and he's a detonator at work. All _pow-pow-pow_—" Krum mimics the motions with his fists. "—anyway—I bet he could _easily_ go pro."

Hermione, her fingers now lingering at his blotchy, discolored cheek, frowns. "Tom doesn't need to go anywhere."

Going pro isn't on his radar. He's worked hard to maintain his middle-of-the-pack reputation, to avoid attention and the danger that would come with it. The last thing he needs is media prying into his life, his past…his medical history.

It's clear the fellow sportsman has caught on.

"Tom's calculated about his losses," Krum says, legs splaying so widely on a chair it's as if he's spilling out of it. "I've seen him…Footwork's too precise…And he never takes a hit _too_ bad. He only loses when he has to. He may play the welterweight division but I bet he could _easily_ take down a man twice his size."

_Let's find out_, Tom thinks darkly, as Krum stands, watching the outline of his broad shoulders recede from the room.

He feels a whack to the back of his head.

Through dark-rimmed eyes, he stares his sibling down with impressive hostility.

"Shut up," she grumbles.

His sister, the mindreader.

His anger is quickly replaced by the hard pang of pain beaming down his leg. He slumps forward, feeling a nauseous rush of warmth to his head. "See the way she treats me, Harry," he utters, dizzy. "Adding insult to injury. Bet she wishes she got to stab me with the knife herself."

"Hermione's a meanie," Harry agrees through a muffled mouthful of sandwich, eager to remain in Tom's good graces.

"Eloquently put," Tom says, trying to lift onto rickety limbs, but fails to steady himself and nearly slips. Hermione catches him; she grabs his arm, pulling it over her shoulder, and clasps a hand at his waist.

Then they're moving. Pressure has built behind his eyes, making it difficult to see straight. The hallway drifts in and out of focus.

Many shaky steps later, the support ends and he feels his ass land on a cold and hard surface—the rim of the bathtub. One leg in, one leg out. He hears the faucet start, feels cold water pooling around his socked toes.

"Your jeans are covered in blood."

"I'm menstruating," he offers, with a sordid half-smile. "Now I know how the other half lives."

His sister, not amused in the slightest, gives a disparaging sigh. "The injury's worse than I imagined." She sounds serious, tense. "I'm going to strip you so I can make the stitches."

"Might be mutually convenient to let me bleed out."

"Tom," she says, like the sound of his name is an argument unto itself.

_You always think you know best,_ he berates in the comfort of his head, but knows he must swallow his pettiness hard and fast, like a pill. There's no room for suicidal musings tonight. There's also no graceful way to take his jeans off, and she doesn't try. She unzips him, hooks her fingers in the belt loops, and yanks the dirtied garment down his hips quickly.

A moment of quiet pervades, likely wide-eyed staring on her part, and an effort to stay lucid on his.

At last, she says, very uncomfortable, "I—Look, I've got to remove your underwear too."

Pain pounding at temples, he feels his eyes roll to the back of his skull, wondering what the hell he did to deserve this. Death by emasculation. Is this the biblical punishment for murder? Old testament? If it is then he and God will need to have a very frank talk at confessional next sunday.

"Don't worry, the door's locked," his sister continues awkwardly, determined to make the situation worse than it already is. "Viktor won't see anything—inappropriate."

Tom has wondered, often in life, if Hermione tries to be deliberately provocative, or if she is simply incapable of comprehending her own innuendos. Her mind is a labyrinth in which he feels lost. Seventeen years of suffering her company has not brought him closer to the truth. It's the appeal of contradiction, he decides—the doctor and the killer. The stethoscope and the blade. She who preserves life and he who...

Well. 

He feels her fingers— soft, warm, irritatingly feminine—grip the elastic of his boxer briefs at his hipbone and slide the garment down his thighs. As an athlete who's spent more than enough time in crowded locker rooms, Tom is numb to nudity, disinterested by male genitalia. Hermione, on the other hand…

A long, alarmed pause.

"Tom," he hears her low murmur.

"Yes?"

"What do I do about…" she trails, clearly overwhelmed.

Tom laughs, almost certain her face has gone bright red. She has never seen anything so magnificent.

"My eyes are up _here_, Hermione."

"I _know_ where your eyes are," she huffs. He feels a snapcap of painkillers pressed into his palm, which he downs instinctually. "You need stitches 'round your upper thigh. I'm just trying to figure out how I'm going to work around your…." She can't even say it. "How can you possibly be hard right now?"

"Blood gets me going."

_"Your own?"_

Pills take little time to numb his nerves and make him not give a damn.

Leaning back against the tiled wall in languid ease, summoning all the arrogance of a greek statue, he smiles. Hazy. Irreverent. "It's out of my hands now. I defer to you, doctor, to handle my anatomy as you see fit."

With a long sigh, Hermione slides on her gloves.

"You think you're so slick," she murmurs, gently nudging his erection out of the way so that she can clean the knife wound. "But you're nothing more than a cunt."

His shoulders give a slight twitch, fighting the sting of alcohol-coated gauze sliding across his lesion. "I think you mean a dick."

"No, I won't make anymore phallic associations with you."

His sister, spoiling his fun. "Imagine what Freud would say," he chuckles.

"This is why you can't play armchair psychologist, Tom. You always name drop the _worst_ people."

"But imagine if we went to a family shrink," he continues, smirking. "If they made us sit on that great big sofa, ten feet apart, dumb Krum in the middle—"

"—_Terrible_—"

"—and asked you what you thought about my penis."

Hermione takes a towel and applies firm pressure to his wound without letting go, waiting for the bleeding and stinging to die down.

"I think I'd die from the humiliation," she utters.

After his pain settles, her steady hands are hard at work on the canvas of his flesh. Tom looks away, though he knows it will be quick, clean, meticulous. Hermione doesn't make mistakes. They hurt very little, as expected. She eases each stitch in with the slow precision he's seen her use with fragile fibers, with glass slides beneath microscopes, with tender myocardium flesh. Her touch is so light, it's almost as if his wound repairs itself. Every so often her gloved knuckles brush the rim of his bare cock, sending a delicious sliver of excitement through him. He exhales quietly, feeling the heat of her hands permeating the gloves at his most volatile skin. How hard he'd cum right now. She could give him the best and worst experience of his life, if she wanted.

It's quite miserable.

"There," she says, softly, at last.

Quelling his thoughts into submission, Tom utters a gravelly 'thanks'. He feels her naked, ungloved hands grab his face, bringing his eyes down to meet his.

She smiles wearily, gently now, her fingers brushing stray hairs off his forehead. "Love you, love you, love you," she whispers. "Now don't go getting stabbed again." She leans in to press a kiss to the edge of his mouth.

He cups her chin before she can pull away, keeps her edge pressed to his, just a few seconds longer. "How else will I keep your attention?" he murmurs.

The remark earns him another whack to the back of his head.

"Sure you don't want to stay here?" Tom asks for the third time, starting the engine and checking the rearview mirror as he backs out of the driveway. "My sister's home is nicer than mine."

The child, in the passenger seat, squirms. Glancing out the window, Harry waves timidly at Hermione standing in the open door of her wide hallway, and then watches as the large house shrinks into the distance as they drive out of the shiny, gated upper-middle-class neighborhood.

"Krum is scary," he whispers.

Tom chuckles, arm leant out the open window, lighting a cigarette. "I'm much scarier," he assures. 

"What will you do with the body Tom?" 

"What body?"

"The dead one in your trunk."

The child is perceptive.

Tom exhales a wispy stream of smoke, as he spins the steering wheel with the heel of his palm, turning onto an unmarked back road where trees are spindlier, branches more brittle, tires catching in every groove and bump and crevice.

"I'll figure something out. Make it disappear somehow."

There is methodology to murder, and if Tom had a week to prepare in advance, he'd have the clean-up sorted out. Gellert was right about him needing to learn to kill under time constraints. Efficiency is a valuable skill, which is why an impromptu, spur-of-the-moment murder sets Tom up with a unique challenge: garbage disposal. Dump it in the river? Bury it in the woods? Procur an incinerator?

"Have you ever killed anyone before, Tom?"

The child asks this in a small, fearful, yet curious voice.

Occupied in thoughts of purchasing an incinerator and how much it would cost, Tom glances at his rearview mirror and rolls the steering wheel, shrugging. "Don't know."

"Why not?"

"Because, Harry," he says, still exhaling smoke, a deep, exasperated sigh into the abyss of the night. "You know the candy that man tried to give you?"

The child nods solemnly.

"I've been on it for most of my life," Tom says. "There's no way I can remember everything I've ever done."

"Oh." A confusion overtakes Harry's face, and his eyes flicker toward his lap in quiet frustration. "Please don't tell the police I ran away from home, Tom."

Now the truth finally outs.

Tom's mouth curves, wry. "You ran away, did you?"

"I had to!" the child shouts, defensive, his fists balling at his sides. "They put me in a cupboard."

"Who did."

"My aunt and uncle...they're _evil_, Tom."

Tom tosses his cigarette out the window and scoffs. "You're too young to know what evil is."

"I know what evil is," Harry whispers. Hunched low in his seat, he looks every bit the part of a petulant child. From where Tom is sitting, he can make out nothing more than top of Harry's badly cut hair and the dirtied soles of his too-big, hand-me-down shoes.

He's an orphan, that's for sure. 

Making a turn onto his block, less rich and safe and suburban than his sister's, Tom cruises past a cracked sidewalk littered with injection paraphernalia, the splash of color in walls from the lurid graffiti. From upper windows comes the boom of music. Hookers stalk the streets in skimpy outfits and high boots looking for work, their bodies as thin as pins, bones jutting out through pallid skin.

No place for a child. 

And yet.

"Let me stay with you," Harry persists. "I hate my family. I _hate_ them."

For the briefest of moments, Tom hesitates. Then a coy and controlled smile settles on his face, toying with the hard line of his mouth. Calm, dark and frightfully monotone, he says:

"And what would you like me to do about your aunt and uncle, Harry. Kill them? Cut them up and bury their body parts across their well-maintained lawn, as a sort of scavenger hunt for the police? Because I could. _Easily_. I'd be the worst tragedy that's ever struck their lives and I'd _enjoy_ it."

The boy stares into his lap, as if struggling with his conscience, a firm face of displeasure. "It's okay, you don't have to do that," he says after a minute. He glances up. "Honestly I think you're a little bit evil too, Tom."

"Then you understand why I can't keep you," Tom says, eyes concentrating on the road. "I'm going to call the police in the morning."

"I said you're a little bit evil," Harry persists. "But I don't think you're _all the way_ evil...you saved me."

"That's because, Harry. I had _loads_ of fun tonight."

Perhaps what makes Tom so dangerous is that he wasn't raised by women, not really. He was raised by his television. 

He never knew his mother, only that she was a maid that was quickly blotted from existence after his birth. And then Jane, the vile bride, who trotted into Tom's life when he turned eight, who loved pill bottles more than she ever loved Tom.

_eat this candy, Tom, now this one, now this one now swallow_

_I don't care if it tastes bad now swallow_

_stop bothering your new mommy now swallow the candy now go the fuck to sleep_

_look at your sister ignore the vomit on her cardigan what a sweet serene child already asleep_

_never fights back_

_be a good child like your sister, Tom._

Lightning flashes through the small living room. Wind rattles the guttering outside and rain beats against the single pane window—the dark lullaby of an abrupt storm.

Curled up on his pull-out sofa, Tom jolts into wakefulness. Thunder rings and outside, a pale blue crack of light is slowly gaining in intensity along the eastern horizon but this is not what has disturbed him. 

It's the boy, standing awake at this godforsaken hour, sweaty strands of hair plastered his forehead, nose scrunched. Petulant little brat. 

"What are you doing," Tom mutters groggy, lip beneath the thick skin of his quilt.

"Got scared. Kept having nightmares about the bad man. Can I sleep here with you?"

"No," Tom says shortly. "I'm not your mother."

With that he closes his eyes, willing himself to fall asleep again. When his breathing begins to level out, he feels the small weight of the boy climb atop his knees. 

He opens his eyes and glares. 

Harry sits mouth puckered, arms folded, refusing to be budged off.

Tom sighs, lifts him up by the armpits and mechanically drops him on the other side of the pull-out sofa.

"Stay there," Tom grumbles, nudging his nose into his pillow as he curves away.

It's not more than a mere seconds later, that a small body's pressing itself to Tom's back. An insistent tug comes at his collar.

"Please…" comes the child's quiet whine. "Don't make me go back to my uncle's, please please…"

The 'please's go on for a _full_ _ten minutes_ before Tom's staring at the wall in wide-eyed, bloodshot disarray, lost in existential crisis. Though he would never harm a child, he twists around to clasp a hand over the orphan's whining mouth. He removes the body compressed to his side like a leech with one arm, rigidly shoving him the full length of the bed away.

"I'll talk with my sister in the morning…I'll convince her to let you stay at hers for the time being," Tom informs, cold and curt, glowering through tired red-rimmed eyes. "Now go to _sleep_."

Harry shakes his head ferociously, a furious pout on his face. 

"I want to stay with _you_," he wails, and squirming close once more, wraps his arms around Tom's waist, burying his face into his side. _Cuddling_.

Sprawled on his back, Tom blinks widely, raking a hand through his hair in frustration, not quite sure what the hell he's gotten himself into. Even Bella isn't this persistent, and he can usually kick her out with some rudimentary manipulation when she becomes clingy. But he cannot condemn a child to the streets. He has no experience dealing with something so small and helpless, and he fears he may have no leverage in the situation. How does one barter with a five year old? 

He picks up his phone, furiously typing a message to the only confidante he has:

**I'm going to drive a blade through your skull**.

The response is instant.

_Hello to you too, gorgeous._

_Can't sleep?_

_Have fun tonight? Get your fix?_

Tom grits his teeth, fingers typing.

**I killed your man.**

**What do I do with the child?**

_You can do whatever you like to him._

_He's yours to play with._

_;)_

The implication makes Tom drop his phone.

He stares at the device, stunned. His breathing's gone shallow. He feels unsanitary. For once in many years of his life, he feels a genuine trill of horror—he no longer feels apathetic, but cold and disgusted beyond belief. Covered in slime and maggots, dripping with the putrid rot of something so terrible that he can not approximate it in words.

Unlatching the sleepy boy from his side, he shoves him to the other side of the bed, not violently, merely enforcing a necessary physical separation.

"What is it?" Harry yawns, confused. 

"Shut up."

His sense of propriety tarnished, Tom cannot look Harry in the eye. He sits up, burying his head in his hands. He wants to tear out his eyeballs. The insinuation alone makes him feel horrible and _filthy_—

He picks up his phone again, types furiously:

**You're a sick motherfucker.**

_You're not?_

_You think you get to grandstand when you killed a man in cold blood tonight?_

_Tell me, did you have fun playing hero?_

**I would never rape a child.**

_That's your problem, not mine._

A surge of violence rises somewhere within Tom, like a wave trying to overwhelm his senses. His mouth curls, snarling, seething — outraged.

**I'm really going to kill you, Gellert.**

_Yeah?_

**You're a fucking monster. **

_Pot. Meet kettle._

**I won't be merciful.**

**I'm going to find you and destroy whatever power, fortune, legacy you hold. I'm going to tear your bones out and feed them to dogs. I'm going to savor every second of your demise.**

_That's what I like to hear._

_Looking forward to it, Tommy._

_Ttyl <3_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry to end on a dark note. I want to make clear nothing heinous happened to kiddo!Harry, except for getting hit on the head. Tom stopped that crime in its tracks. Nothing bad will happen to kiddo!Harry in this fic, except that he's stuck with Tom, who'll have to live out his worst nightmare of having to be responsible for a kid. Fun times.
> 
> Let me know what you think!


	7. Chapter 7

The morning opens in mania.

A furious _click-clack_ of the keyboard. An increasingly unbearable spin of the CPU cooler fan. A hoodie drawn over unwashed hair as he stares the illuminated screen down with unnerving, near-_hostile_ focus. He is less handsome and polished today, less 'Tom Riddle', less the cover of _People's_ magazine and more a real human, like the ones you see in the streets. He doesn't care. Not when the world's vaulted knowledge sits at click of mouse and touch of fingertip.

He flits near one hundred tabs, scrolls pages of social media, criminal directories, search engines, even the Russian ones, endless text racing past his blurring vision _— _unable to find a single piece of information about 'Grindelwald'. No digital footprint.

It grinds Tom's teeth. He feels harassed by the invisibility of his friend. He throws off his hoodie, rakes a heavy set of fingers through his hair. Rubs the heels of his palms against his shot eyes. "Fuck with my head," he yawns. "I'll tear yours off."

A reassuring mantra.

A promise. 

Knowledge and progress and murder and science and power and truth and justice and god_—_the higher ideals don't care about beauty. They have always been morbid, ugly, unsafe, insane. Tom has lived twenty-five years of life, never hitting beneath the glass of his own surface. But some things need authenticity. 

For some things 'Tom Riddle' must be authentic.

Even if only in the privacy of himself. 

That's where **[V0ld3m0rT]** comes in.

He gets on his hidden VPN and over the next few hours hacks his way into long-buried government archives, encrypted FBI databases, hidden criminal records. He glares through dark, sunken eyes at white pixels against black as fragments of code clog the gears of his mind. Incessant fingers drum keys. He scans letters on the screen, rapidly roving line to line, Infiltrates site to site, database to database. He walks a tightrope, fights walls of cybersecurity. One wrong move will reveal his IP address, his identity, get him arrested. Tom can lose his entire life in a few clicks. 

He won't.

He hacks chatroom conversations, high-profile private ones, populated with hackers, millionaire merchants of drugs and weapons, and dangerous criminals, the ones responsible for the market economy crashes, the bombings, the recessions, the missile strikes, the ones that rig the elections and start the wars, the ones responsible for every front-page tragedy in the world _— _the other 'hims'.

The investigation accomplishes little. 

In the scummy underbelly of the internet, no one comes forth with much detail. No one will risk self-incrimination. The other 'hims' are as selfish as Tom. Response varies from conspiracy to misdirection. Occasionally, a half-truth.

> _Grindelwald? Sure I've heard the name. _ _He's got more money than god—_
> 
> _—tech wizard or something—_
> 
> _—mines consumer data for identity theft, financial fraud, you name it—_
> 
> _—stay the hell away from him unless you want your life ruined—_
> 
> _—owns a lot of banks. A LOT of banks—_
> 
> _—runs a child trafficking ring with absurd prices but I'm not telling you how I know that—_
> 
> _—a wealthy entrepreneur that finds gaps in the economy and fills them—_
> 
> _—a satanist that practices black magic—_
> 
> _—fills consumer needs—_
> 
> _—just another evil, rich, white guy—_
> 
> _—a wealthy politician—_
> 
> _—not a politician but he has trade agreements with world officials that keep him out of legal trouble—_
> 
> _—a smart businessman—_
> 
> _—the top one-percent of the top one-percent—_
> 
> _—one of the guys no one knows about, the guys that are invisible— _
> 
> _—all I know is he makes snuff films on the internet—_
> 
> _—fills consumer demand and supply—_
> 
> _—even if the media knew about him, they wouldn't do a story on him. Not if reporters cared about their careers—_
> 
> _—friends in high places—_
> 
> _—throws fantastic parties—_
> 
> _—untouchable—_
> 
> _—rules the world—_

And then finally **[V0ld3m0rT]** gets:

> _Had a friend who was recruited for one of G's organizations at a party. Said pay's good but the work gave him nightmares. Signed an NDA and had to flee the country when he quit._
> 
> _He was found 'suicided' a few years later._

Of course Gellert has no problem quietly assassinating anyone he deems a loose end_—_but why the interest in Tom? Aside from the obvious gay crush. 

Is Tom being recruited?

A child’s chin sets on his shoulder. Freshly roused from tossing and squirming against him all night, Harry has climbed the back wheels of the computer chair. His hands grip Tom's hoodie sleeves to hang on. He maintains a stream of questions, letting Tom know at least _one of them_ slept well.

“What are you doing?” comes the spirited chirp.

“Nothing.” 

“Can I help?”

“No.”

“It looks fun. _Pretty please_ can I help?”

Tom swivels his chair around, toppling him off like a domino, though it turns out to be a very bad game of dominos. It's a game of ball. A child's low center of gravity allows for rebound; a rubber ball against the wall can only bounce back. In seconds Harry is on his feet, buoyant, perky with energy. Seeing opportunity for easy access to Tom's lap now, he begins an upward trek, climbs Tom like a monkey ascending a tree.

Tom grabs him by the armpits and sets him back on the ground. “No,” he says, stern.

“I’m hungry,” comes the next whine.

“Then go eat.” Tom turns to stare at the screen, fingers beating keys. He cannot waste energy with childish games, not when adult games are being played. He feels certain he is in a crime thriller film with the villain being Gellert, even if he distrusts his own narrative. His thoughts burn with many perceived plot holes. One, if Gellert is as powerful as his reputation bids then why waste time provoking a nobody like Tom? Two, what does does he hope to gain from this, as he calls it, 'friendship'? Three and most important, why hasn't he tried to kill Tom yet? Delaying a murder is like delaying an orgasm_—_there's no point. If Tom was Gellert, he would've found and killed Tom already. 

Then again, maybe Gellert can afford to waste time, and men, and money. 

And Tom's brain cells.

Maybe the villain is just _bored_. 

_What a pointless villain, _Tom thinks as he types code, knowing he could do a better job. Case in point, the next minute passes in hacking onto the interface of Hungary's military database. Then again, maybe not, because right after that, a wall props and Tom gets thrown out of the system. His screen flickers with errant code fragments, freezes. 

Crashes. 

He slams his laptop shut. "Fantastic." Exhales through his teeth. 

He hears the noise of dishes clattering. 

The glance made over his shoulder is instantly regretted. It's as if a drunken cyclone has erupted in his kitchen, cans and bottles strewn across the floor. His lower cabinets have been excavated, by the infestation. Now it digs to the back of Tom’s fridge, throwing out the salad bowls and diet Cokes and egg whites and protein drinks, on the prowl for acceptable sustenance. “Do you have pizza?” 

“Do I look like someone who eats pizza?” Tom says dryly, just looking to be alone in this moment.

Reaching into a drawer he pulls out a cuban cigar, and using a cutter slices the end with great care. His most expensive vice, but a good appetite suppressant. 

“Well, can you order me pizza?”

“Sure.” Tom, mid-slow drag of the fat thick blunt, remains resolutely faced away from the mess. “And why don't I call the police while I’m at it?”

The child halts mid-protein drink toss, stiffening at the threat. Stills. He spins, mouth puckered and ready to bawl. 

"_Tom—"_

“Then clean it up,” Tom says, face hard, angrily exhaling smoke.

As the ultimatum enters the air, the child scrambles, shoving dishes wherever they fit, kicking and throwing foodstuff under the table out of sight. It will suffice. Tom isn't much for cleaning either; one does not need to be when one is only responsible for oneself. What matters is that Hermione won't see a mess when she arrives. Tom knows the argumentative nature of his sister, and he isn't in the mood for any form of harassment from her unless, of course, it's sexual. 

Speaking of sexual harassment. 

A sudden rapping on his door. 

Tom remains on his ass, puffing his cigar and ignoring the sound, wondering how his morning can possibly get any worse.

The knocking intensifies. "It's Bella, darling!"

So this is how.

Tom prepares himself for this next minute of effort. For all his hatred of the uninvited and intrusive, his girlfriend requires exceptional willpower not to maim. She is an exercise in self-restraint. He has never assaulted her. He centers his mind so he will also not commit female battery today. A girlfriend turned victim is no longer useful as an alibi.

He takes his sweet time lifting off his chair, scratching his chest lazily, and saunters over. Opening the door a crack, he greets, with his most friendly smile. "How are you?"

"It's been a long time since I've seen my _beautiful_ _beau_."

Bella is speaking with a terrible French accent today. If she has decided to switch accents on him, it means she has been watching foreign movies. Bella, much like Tom, has no sense of who she wants to be. She makes a dramatic hand gesture that goes unnoticed, because Tom isn't looking at her. 

The thing Tom sees are breasts, which are visible through her black, low-cut dress. She looks like the villainess of an esoteric gothic film that Tom has never bothered to watch. They are in very different films today. Tom knows her point here is to get laid. He's certain she's practiced her dialogue for what will be another uncomfortable fantasy session. _'__Pretend to be a brooding vampire, Tom! ' '__Shove me against the wall and fuck me like in the movies, Tom!' 'Make it hurt like you can't get enough of me, Tom!' _Tom's acting skills aren't that great.

He dodges her sloppy kiss, for he's already brushed his teeth. "It's only been three days," he says.

"That's a _long_ time for couples to be apart," she insists.

"All right." He's in no mood to argue with a dumb bitch. He's trying to end this conversation with minimal effort.

Her mascara-heavy lashes bat rapidly. What would be harmless flirting if Tom didn't see the morbid determination in it. She won't leave until she's had her_—_literal_—_fill of him. 

Next comes the suggestive dip of her bare shoulder.

And at last, a simpering, "So can I come in?"

Tom grips the pane, standing wedged between her and the door.

"I'm busy," he says, his tone calm.

The darkly-painted mouth twists. Finally her gaze falls over the whole of him. She will notice he is less polished and more mundane today. Disheveled mess of hair, faded hoodie, rumpled boxers.

"Why are you half dressed?"

The great joy of solitary living is that one can go without pants for as long as one pleases. He doesn't have to justify this to her. 

But he will screw with her. 

"I'm cheating on you," he scoffs, deliberately and blatantly playing on her worst insecurities.

Her face falls faster than a boot of cement.

"Joke," he backtracks. "I'm playing video games. It's my day off."

Too late. She's suspicious now. "And why can't we spend your day off _together?"_ she says_—_ hisses, pushing at his arms, trying to get past him while he stands there, a brick-wall. "That's what couples _do_."

Bella's somehow forgotten he has exceptional arm strength. He grips one shoulder, holds her in place as she squabbles against him, fighting to get through, until she's exhausted herself. 

She falls back with a huff. 

"There's someone in there with you isn't there?" she says, voice brimming with hurt.

Tom glances boredly over his shoulder.

A five-year-old is punting soda cans into the laundry hamper.

He turns back around to Bella and says, "Yes."

Her face crumples with hurt. "Is she a better fuck than me? Is that why you're breaking up with me like this, you _cruel_ monster?" she says bitterly.

Tom stands quiet, unbothered. Thinking.

Breaking...up. Her words are interesting. He's breaking up? This is how normal men get rid of their girlfriends isn't it? Is that what he's doing now? 

What a perfect modern out.

_Breaking up. _Such a simple solution. It absolves one of all effort. It's even better than murder, because there is no clean up, and because it's socially acceptable. Encouraged even. 

Why didn't he think of it sooner?

"That's a great idea. I'm breaking up," he says. 

And shuts the door.

Turning around, he leans against it. Closes his eyes, and breathes. Feeling successful in having maneuvered himself out of the social interaction with no loose ends. 

His eyes open to find the child staring at him. 

"You have a girlfriend?" Harry, for some reason, looks hurt and upset. 

"I did. But I took care of it."

"What about Hermione?" comes a follow-up. 

Incorrectly grasping the question, Tom says, “Impossible to get rid of her." He stalks back to his desk to resume his work. “On the subject_—_get the mess hidden away before my sister gets here or she won't shut up about it.”

Harry freezes mid-punt. “When’s she coming over?” Excitement_—_likely at the prospect of food_—_ takes his voice. 

"Soon. To take you to the hospital."

The excitement curdles into anxiety.

“Are they gonna give me a shot?" Harry says, sounding panicked.

"Don't know," Tom says, monotone, doing nothing to quell this fear. He opens his laptop, starts it, and draws on his headphones. 

"Can you come too?" 

Tom's eyes remain on his screen. "No. I’m busy."

"_Please_. Please please..."

The whining goes on for five minutes, proving a great distraction, even through headphones. 

With a disgruntled sigh, Tom finally stands.

Stalking over, he yanks the child off the floor, wrapping a strong arm around his waist, carrying him sideways like a bundled roll of carpet. 

He sets the child on the counter for inspection, his gaze sweeping over the round face.

"Listen," Tom says, palms on the granite edge. "No matter how many times you say that word, I'm _not_ keeping you."

The face scrunches, and the eyes glisten with tears. 

"Please..." Harry whispers, clasping his hands together. The child could act in melodramas. "Please please _please_ don't send me back to my aunt and uncle...They're _mean_ to me."

"I'm mean too."

"You're _less_ mean," Harry persists, which is quite an assessment to make about Tom Riddle, and then the boy is back to his climbing ways. Two stringy arms wrap around Tom's shoulders; the boy has trapped him in a hug. "You're my friend," he insists, burrowing his head forcibly under Tom's chin. 

It's plain to see why this child got abducted. 

Grabbing the back of Harry's shirt, Tom yanks him off and slides him back on the counter.

"You shouldn't trust people so easily," he says, reproachful. "Adults shouldn't want to be your friend. The ones that claim they do_—_" He pauses, mouth tightening. "Those aren't the type of adults you want to be around."

"How come?" the boy says. 

Tom exhales, rubbing his fingers at his brow, looking to the side. How do you explain 'rape', 'exploitation', and 'grooming' to a five year old?

Simple answer: You don't.

Those are all adult words with no space in a child's vernacular. 

Taking a smarter route Tom opens a drawer, removes a swiss paring knife. Pretty little thing. Delicate, with a wavy edge, and a red handle. It's one of Tom's favorite knives and will wound when used correctly. If employed at the right vessels_—_ jugular, carotid_—_ it can kill though such an attack requires anatomical precision beyond a child's capacity. An excellent practice blade still. Tom too received his first blade at five along with lessons on the neighbor's pitbull. Father said the best gift to bestow a child is instruction in self-defense. Father often gave gifts of this nature. 

Tom lowers his head a bit, leans in with some theatrical flair. He holds the blade out, the handle up to the boy in offering, eyes sly and conspiratorial.

"The next time someone puts a hand on you." His mouth twitches. "You just..." He makes a clicking sound with the back of his tongue. "chop their fingers off. Not many. Two or three. Just for fun." 

Harry looks stricken. 

But he reaches to grip the handle, curiously, tentatively. He holds the blade, weighs it inside his palm. "S'too scary." He vigorously shakes his head, handing it back to Tom who presses it to the counter with sharp end faced away in one swift move.

"Better to fend for yourself than to rely on others," Tom advises.

Harry, troubled by the wisdom he has received, shakes his mop head, jumps the counter. Sinks to his knees, latches onto Tom's leg _— _sympathy tactic. The sort of melodrama that would surely work on Hermione.

It won't work on Tom. 

Still, the child persists. "I won't bug you if you let me stay here," he rattles, anxious and breathless, squeezing Tom's knee. "I won’t ask for pizza. And if you don't tattle to the police, I wont tattle to your sister about the dead body in your trunk... I'll keep all your secrets. _Please."_

Staring down, Tom tilts his head.

"Excuse me?" he says, brows raising. 

Is the child...blackmailing him?

By the time Hermione finally arrives, Tom's laying on the sofa with his eyes squeezed just awaiting an end to his newly-proscribed torment. The child is sprawled across his stomach, swinging his legs, immersed in a game he has downloaded onto Tom's stolen phone.

When Tom opens his eyes, he finds his sister standing in the doorway looking amused. She is wearing a skirt, a mid-thigh floral fabric he can't tear his gaze away from. Ridiculous gesture of femininity. Stupid. Disturbing. It doesn't suit her. Her legs are too delicate. Who dressed her this morning?

"You didn't knock," he says, feigning offense. "I could've been naked."

"I've seen everything at this point," she intones dryly, and greets the young boy running to hug her by picking him up and pressing a flurry of kisses to his face. 

"All right," Tom says, standing, yanking his hoodie off, if only so she'll have a good view of his shoulder muscles as he stalks to his room. "Be a pervert then." Pleased to be relieved of child duties, he opens his laptop to resume his investigation.

From the kitchen he hears his sister manage the child.

"Did you bring me a peanut butter sandwich?" comes the chirp. 

"I did. But I also brought you other things." Tom hears the clunk of boxes, his sister setting out tupperware. "Steamed carrots and broccoli!"

Harry's excitement is duly dampened. Tom listens to him shout, "I want the peanut butter sandwich!" while Hermione tries to cajole and coo and and _choo-choo train_ foods into his mouth. Minutes pass, whining rises and quells, and soon enough there are quiet sounds of hungry chewing, indication the child has been tamed.

Meanwhile, Tom's finger flicks across his mouse scroll, running through the endless script of a watchlist of Hungarian terrorist organizations.

His finger freezes. 

Wait.

Gellert will not be on this list. He is not a trite villain in a children's novel trying to take over the world.

He already _runs_ it. 

With no effort, it would seem, because he has far too much free time on his hands. 

"Deathly Hallows," Tom murmurs under his breath, and blanches in surprise at his own insight. Where did he get those words? 

He remembers now.

Gellert's livestream.

That was the name of Gellert's livestream. 

Tom types 'Deathly Hallows' into the search bar. 

An incredulous scoff. 

The top result is a funeral company. He clicks the website to find little information present. Just a black interface. No address, hours of operation, detail about funeral arrangements or the owners. All that exists is an ABOUT US page.

Tom clicks it

> We are a global organization of likeminded people here for all your DEATHLY needs. We are everywhere and our only tool is LOVE. We come from all kinds of backgrounds with our main shared characteristic that we’re a coalition, curious and open-minded. While many of our operations require anonymity for the safety of our members, we strive to create a better community of understanding between us and for the BETTERMENT of mankind.
> 
> L. 
> 
> I. 
> 
> C. 
> 
> L. 

And beneath that. 

By now Tom is fairly certain the site is a front for some sort of violent cult run by Gellert. There is simply no other explanation. Problem is there isn't any further information to dissect. 

He decides to hack the site.

As expected it's heavily encrypted, elliptic curve cryptography, complex integer algorithm sequences he hasn’t seen in years. He supposes going to college—though he never finished the degree—wasn't entirely useless after all. 

He doesn't get far before he feels a hand press at his shoulder. The same irritatingly feminine hand slides behind his head, cradling his skull, fingers threading through his hair.

"Tom," her soft murmur.

A box is set at his desk and Tom stares at it. Three compartments. Little peeled apple slices. Perfectly symmetrical heart-cut strawberries. Neat, white sandwich squares with the crusts taken off. It is children's food and it has been prepared, with great care, to be aesthetically pleasing.

His sister is shrewd.

She has been reading psychiatry books.

"I've put Harry down for a short nap," she says, quietly, leaning against his desk. "Can you eat or do I have to feed you as well? Because I'm not leaving today until I've actually _seen_ you eat."

Tom stares down the tupperware, calculating the damage. Two thousand five-hundred calories. That's how much a grown man is meant to eat daily. Tom hasn't eaten that much in three weeks. He should eat, but he can't. There's power in restriction. He likes that it gives him power over himself, a vengeance against the uncertainty of his mind. Should Tom find himself going off the rails, he can restore order with a brake. The power to kill himself—a necessary failsafe.

But his sister can't understand. She doesn't know the sort of negotiations a person like Tom must make with himself. She has little appreciation for his jokes; she would not like his honesty. It would pain her to have to hear him explain himself.

So he won't.

His fingers wrap the soft flesh of her forearm. He tugs her close, to that her bare thigh bumps his bare knee. 

He smirks sharply up at her.

"Sit in my lap and feed me," he says.

He expects to be rebuffed, a smack to the back of his head, but she—determined to win their little spats for once—takes the bait.

"Fine," she huffs.

Tom raises his brows. 

He gives a breathless laugh. 

Biting his lower lip, he stares brazenly as she straddles one skirted leg determinedly over his lap. His sister, a former debate club president, has finally figured out how to win _one_ argument with Tom.

Tom has no problem losing this one argument to Hermione's skirt. He can lose to it everyday, multiple times, all day long. The shorter the better. The provocation of her thighs spreading at the junction of his abdomen makes him grunt softly. She leverages her weight to his left thigh, avoiding pressure to the stitches in his right. What a thoughtful sister. 

"Okay?" she murmurs, looking anywhere but at his face. 

"Uhuh," he breathes, eyes glued to her hips, feeling a lowering of mental faculties — blood redistributing from his brain to his most tender organ with little effort. He grows unsubtly hard underneath her. She squirms as he scoots them tight. He's suddenly glad she came wearing a skirt. He likes the warmth of that soft, plush cunt. Only the thin fabric of her underwear in the way, her pussy pulse throbs against his stomach. A delicious second heartbeat to his own.

"Comfy?" he breathes at the shell of her ear. His fingers return to intercepting code on the screen behind her head, as she brings a quarter sandwich to his mouth. He takes it in one swallow, licks her index and middle fingers, biting at the flesh of her thumb.

"Ow!" she hisses, wringing her hand back as though he's committed a grave injury. "Why are you so inappropriate?"

His sister, queen of irony.

"You wouldn't like me if I was appropriate," he says, eyes glued to the screen, scanning and trying to decipher lines of code in his mind. "You wouldn't know what to do with me."

"I've never known what to do with you," comes her inciting huff.

Hermione doesn't know when to shut up. 

Mildly annoyed, he nudges his torso against her plushy cunt.

He feels her body twitch, hears her murmur 'Tom' in argument.

He presents his counterargument, lifting and angling his abdomen to deliver an _agonizingly_ slow grind at the soft, little cunt.

He hears a sharp, stuttering exhale. A more insistent '_Tom'_.

His name sounds more an obscenity now than it ever has leaving her angry mouth. With a brusque kiss at her cheek, he relents, "This is just how biology works, Hermione." 

"I know how biology works," she grits, between fast exhales, bringing another quarter sandwich to his mouth—somehow _still_ determined to feed him. "You dog."

Tom swallows the proffered bite, licks her fingers clean, and pushes against her cunt again. He feels her hips push back as she gives an aching groan. “This is all your fault, Hermione," he breathes at her temple. "You’ve had seventeen years to figure out what you want to do to me.”

_“To you?” _

“With me,” he corrects. “Freudian slip.”

“It's distasteful that you keep evoking Freud," she grits, breathing sharply. "He was a gentleman and a scholar, not a sex fiend like you.” 

Sex fiend? He grinds her little cunt, and she grinds right back. “Get your mind out of the gutter, Hermione. You’re a doctor for christ's sake.”

"Seventeen years spent in your utter fuckery and I've still got no clue what the hell your problem is," she riles back, between hitched pants.

Tom's shoulders tighten.

He straightens his spine and drops pretense, his taut stomach pressing _hard_ against her cunt. He hears a sharp, hitched yelp—of unadulterated surprise—from her lips. She quickly buries her face into his bare shoulder, to hide her expression, and he thinks, _What a glorious sitting position._

His fingers return to the keyboard. As Tom breaks through the first wall of encryption, the code clears.

On the screen it reads, in flaming bright letters: BURNING PINK.

How theatrical. 

Definitely Gellert.

"What burns pink?” he says. “Besides your face.”

"Excuse me?" she mumbles, exhaling rhythmically to the forceful friction from his undulating body. She presses a gasping, angry, open-mouthed kiss to naked muscle, in a sort of _fuck you _that gets lost in subtext_. _Not terribly effective.

"It's chemistry. Trivia really," he says, his large hand moving away her curls, clasping at her nape to hold her steady as she feeds him another sandwich square. He makes a show of sucking her fingers clean and grinds his body hard, retaliatory into her soft, little cunt. Seventeen years, she says. Still doesn't get it, she says. Higher education has been wasted on his sister. "What substance burns pink. I know it’s metallic… Strontium chloride …no, that’s red… calcium…barium…"

"Lithium chloride," she pants.

Tom freezes, his body growing rigid. His sister groans softly as the aggressive stimulation to her cunt stops.

Yes.

Yes.

_Yes._

He presses an appreciative kiss to the edge of her mouth, grabs her by his fingers underneath her armpits, and mechanically lifts her off his lap. "Hey—" And _throws_ her to his bed.

Landing sprawled on hands and knees, Hermione looks like an awkwardly displaced kitten. She stares at him, hair tousled over shoulders and face bright pink, eyes wide in embarrassment and confusion.

"What's the—"

"Quiet," Tom says tersely. He leans his elbows on the table, clawing both hands through his hair, deep in thought. 

Think.

Think.

Finally it strikes him. 

He reaches into his pocket and removes the pills he confiscated from Harry the night before. Sets them down on the his table. Studies them beneath his lamplight. Blank white capsules. Likely homemade. He takes out his lighter and sets one on fire.

It burns _pink_. 

"Lithium chloride," comes the murmur behind him, and he nods. He reaches into his drawer and removes and removes his cigar cutter, and slices the other pill in half. White powder. Harry was never meant to eat these pills. He was meant to give them to Tom. Tom was meant to _find_ these pills. 

Tom is meant to be investigating Gellert. 

That is all Gellert's design. 

Tom goes back to the ABOUT ME page and stares at the letters sprawling down the page. 

> L.
> 
> I.
> 
> C.
> 
> L.

_LiCl _is the abbreviated form of Lithium Chloride. But why is that important? It may also be an abbreviation for something else. The C...Company? Conglomerate? Tom glares at the screen, grinding his jaw. He can't figure this out without context. He needs more. 

"Hello?" Hermione says from his bed, sounding irritated. "I'm still here. Are you ignoring me now?"

Shoulders tensing, Tom freezes.

Swivels his chair.

His eyes rake over her mussed appearance, crawling up her legs. A different kind of awareness pulses behind his lashes. 

The rigid whitecoat bitch is gone, and in her place is a deliciously warmblooded and pink thing sprawled on his bed. Pink mouth, pink tongue, pink face. He wants to find out if her cunt is as pink. He wants to taste it and see if it tastes the way he's imagined. He thinks it will taste better, since he's starving. He'd continue this investigation on the bed if he wasn't so wired right now. Still...

"Take that off." He nods at her skirt.

_"Excuse me?"_

Tom's gaze latches onto her eyes, which shine with a mixture of confusion, anger, and hurt. "What?" he says, rudely. "You want in my lap. Well I want that stupid skirt off. It's in the way." He wants her underwear off too, so he can feel her raw, hot and open and bare, against him while he solves this. The softness and slickness of her... that'd be absolute heaven.

The open pervertedness makes her mouth waver.

Next, a scowl of dignified outrage.

A pillow is aggressively chucked at his head.

"Are you mentally ill? Have you forgotten your pills?" she says, furious. "You're talking to your goddamn _sister_."

Tom catches the second pillow thrown at his face, spinning freely in his chair. Always the pills. And what's her excuse?

"Right," he says, tonelessly, "In that case—"

She yelps, making a dash to the door as he chucks the pillow at her head with just as much aggression.

"I want my goddamn sister _out of my room_," he finishes, hard and stiff. With a cold, abrupt shove, he knocks the box of food she had tediously prepared off his desk into the trash. He revels in the hurt that floods her widened eyes. Mentally ill, she called him. It makes something shrivel up inside Tom. It makes the blood in his veins run cold. He has no appetite now. He thinks _fuck her_. He can make a sport out of pissing her off too.

He swivels away, yanks his drawer open. Tears the cap off his damned pill bottle. He makes sure she can see him swallow, see him suffer. He will make this her punishment as well as his.

The pill burns and aches as it squeezes down his throat. 

"There," he shudders, glaring at her. "Numb and neutered, how you like me. Happy?"

"Tom—"

"Get out."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Classic step-sibling fuckery amiright? 
> 
> Let me know what you think! I do love your analyses. By the way Bella is in no way gone from Tom's life. She's got a big role to play in this fic. 
> 
> Apologies if I haven't responded to your review yet. I'm getting to it ASAP.


	8. Chapter 8

Two years prior, Hermione met her husband the only way she meets living men—in the ER.

During a brutal, absolutely _grueling_ training season in the famous rugby-player's life, a steroid overdose forces Viktor Krum into cardiac arrest. 

It is the beginning of a very confusing love story.

"Move out of the way!" someone shouts.

Viktor gasps out. Pushed along on a stretcher, his chest burns from intense pain, the tightness spreading to his neck, jaw and back. He thinks he will die from his drug-addled stupidity. He decides it might not be so bad to die, if it means he never has to face his coach, teammates, or parents again. 

Then he sees the young surgeon's face.

She's the nicest human he's seen in his entire life.

Nice, as in Kind. Warm. _Comforting_. Not beautiful, because if Viktor Krum is honest with himself, then of course he's seen more beautiful women—like any professional athlete with their share of model flings and girlfriends and (_selfish stupid impulsive)_ one-night-stands. But none have eyes as brown or kind as _hers_. Her gaze feels like a warm quilt splaying over him. 

"Hello Viktor," she says.

"An angel?" is the first thing he blurts, his voice thick through the anesthetic. 

Her smile is contained, briefly amused, as she draws on her face mask. She's heard this line before.

"Deep breaths," she says, craning her neck to inspect the monitor, allowing Krum to fixate on the thin golden chain around her slim neck. It softens her, gives her a slight femininity. His bleary vision spirals, before finding the gloved fingers hovering over his bare chest. No bulge means no wedding ring. Thank god. "We're putting you under, Viktor." She keeps saying his name, which he likes; it helps calm him down. "Everything's going to be all right, Viktor. Try not to move. There's nothing to be scared of. There may be a slight sting…"

His fingers squeeze hers at the sting of penetrated flesh. Icy fluid—sedative—floods his veins.

"Is..." He's fading now, and terrified. "Is there a chance I might die?"

"Very, very small chance," she says, her words echoing like a distant memory inside his head. The pressure of her latex fingers clenches his. Somehow, it's more intimate than a kiss. "You're young and healthy. No reason for anything to go wrong."

"Don't let me die...please." His voice blurs, mind dissociating. He knows he sounds stupid, needy. He’s at the mercy of someone he doesn’t even know. "I'm… too young." He's not sure if he's bargaining with the lovely young surgeon or with god.

"I've never let anyone die, Viktor," comes the echo of her voice, a scarf of reassurance that winds around his throat.

He's no idea if it is real but he’ll believe it.

He's only just seen her. Already he's afraid of never seeing her again.

After his operation, life isn't something Viktor will take for granted again. 

Especially not when Dr. Hermione Riddle has the thickest, most glorious set of curls he's ever seen. He also likes the way her eyes light up for him. It's his primary motivation to keep eating well, walking well, going to physical therapy, the basic human things. Viktor revels in the easy praise and admiration she gives, when those two words were always so _hard won_ in his previous life, where every victory coincided with grueling pain and working himself to the cold, hard bone. But he thinks Hermione might understand. At every post-op she wears a beatific smile despite her own fatigue, and while she looks like she is always dying for a nap, and is always, always unkempt, he can't quite imagine her any other way. Viktor's mind has dissociated, put _her_ on a pedestal, projecting a fantasy of the exact type of girl this weak, pathetic, hurting version of him wants: a nurturing girl, a caring girl, pleasant looking but not beautiful enough to make him feel like he might lose her at any minute. A girl with a level head. A girl that won't mind stitching a broken man together. A safe, homely, patient girl.

A sister, but a sister you can fuck.

"You watch rugby?"

It's a douchebag question. He's coming off desperate, but he just wants to find something in common with this fucking glorious lady surgeon.

"I watch boxing." She lets slip, once, during a post-op.

"Close enough." He grins. Then uses the segue-way to ask her out. 

But that's only half the battle. 

It's a miracle when he can finally _arrange_ that date.

The first few times Hermione will blow him off. She'll makes excuses. Her lifestyle isn't compatible—her job too taxing, her research too important, and she has too many 'family emergencies' for a romantic life. Viktor gets it. Though it annoys him that on their first date Hermione spends half the time in a shouting match with Tom on the phone (_"Sorry I have to leave early—my bastard of a brother's dislocated his shoulder."_) Viktor understands families are tricky. His affluent parents are just as demanding and will not stop hounding Viktor about settling down (_You're almost thirty! Choose a decent girl or you can forget about receiving a cent from us!_). Hermione has the worse lot in life it seems, a brother— _step-brother_ she stresses— who occupies all her mental bandwidth, who will show up uninvited at any given hour with a gruesome injury or yet another bastard demand, late at night or before the wee light of the morning, prime boyfriend-fucking hours, and steal her attention. Sure. Fine. Viktor can be patient. He's not looking for a quick lay. This girl has saved his life. He can put up with one unruly sibling. 

So Viktor thinks. 

But Tom Riddle is more than one sibling— he is at least _seven, _because of the frequency of his intrusions, and also because it seems damn near impossible for any injury to seriously maim him. Given the violent nature of his job and notable lack of health insurance, Tom Riddle has an incredible tact for survival. Or maybe it is testament to Hermione's medical skill. What's worse, Tom Riddle also looks like an underwear model. Nearly perfect facial structure, cheeks so hollow, a jaw so defined, it really _shouldn't_ be possible. That is unless, he is maintaining a dangerously low body fat percentage at all times. Then there's that Adonis belt— impossibly defined muscular grooves on the surface anatomy of Tom Riddle's abdomen running from his iliac crest dipping below his boxing shorts to his pubis. Not that Viktor _stares at _Tom Riddle's pubic region, it's just that athletes care far more about musculature than cynical girls like Hermione ("_I don't need you to tell me my brother's hot— how I wish he looked like a horse's behind"). _It's a common, perfectly acceptable heterosexual practice to check out the bodies of other athletes, especially when they look like Tom Riddle, and Viktor can't help but note that he looks good from _every_ angle, whether he's pounding fists in the ring or lounging mostly-naked on his balcony with sunglasses on, his thick illustrious black hair slicked back, his boxers doing a tantalizing slide down his narrow hips. If men have beauty standards, then Viktor is fairly certain Tom Riddle is _the standard. _

He is also certain that Tom Riddle is _gay._

It is the only explanation. It lines up perfectly with what Hermione has told him: Tom is 'troubled' (struggling with his sexuality), 'reclusive' (in the closet), and 'pretends to be someone he's not' (self-explanatory). And of course, no straight man could ever maintain himself so well in such a violent sport, with such rigor. Straight men have no appreciation for beauty. They don't know how to put effort into themselves. They are too busy chasing tits and playing video games. 

"Tom isn't gay," Hermione argues while she chops raw chicken in preparation for their dinner date, knife hitting the wooden cutting board in fast, efficient thuds. His surgeon girlfriend has frightening dexterity with sharp tools. Her love language, Viktor has also learned, is _food. _It's strange how she can convey both a threat and nurturing affection within the same action. Viktor finds he is really into Hermione because she is extremely entertaining company; he's having a great time. "Tom has a girlfriend named Bella. Which means he _can't_ be gay."

Viktor laughs from his reclined couch. "Many sportsmen keep fake girlfriends to fool the media. Some of them even get married. But it doesn't not make them _gay_."

"Tom _isn't_ gay."

"Why are you so bothered by the idea." He glances up to find her brow furrowed, her face scrunched, as she repeatedly assaults the chicken.

"I'm _not," _she hisses, in a way that makes it clear that she is quite bothered. 

"You should be more open-minded Hermione, so he'll feel more comfortable coming out. For all you know he could be leading a complete _double life_ right under your very nose." 

"Tom's not in the closet, he's in a goddamn dungeon," Hermione utters sordidly, slashing through a poultry leg bone. "That he's gone and locked himself into." She raises the knife, wags it in the air. "And _I'm_ stuck guarding the key."

"Just like a good sister," Viktor teases.

He makes a swift roll off the furniture, laughing as Hermione's hurled tomato misses his head by a margin. 

Next few weeks go more smoothly. Conversations for the couple steadily get deeper, more adult. Viktor tells her how he feels suffocated by the expectations of his wealthy, immigrant parents. Hermione tells him she was born to a pill popping mother who didn't want her. Viktor tells her his teenage years were defined by being shifted from one sports practice to the next. Hermione tells him she feels lucky to make it out of childhood alive. Viktor, a bit shamefully, gives her the exact double-digit number of women he’s been with. Hermione admits she has no experience in bed, and that she doesn’t mean to be rude and standoffish, but she just doesn’t know how to do this—who'd have thought? Twenty-eight-year old virgin with daddy issues, okay, Viktor decides he can handle that. He's not going to make her feel bad for something she’s told him in confidence.

Month two they finally make it to his bedroom.

It’s Hermione’s first time, so he knows he has to make her comfortable. He rubs her shoulders and trails kisses down her neck, all those things he hasn’t done since his teenage years, because he hasn't _had_ to. But she’s still not wet, so he knows he must perform oral. She squirms and yanks at his hair when his tongue laps at her, insisting _it feels too funny down there_, so he stops. Hermione is shy, frigid, awkward—uncomfortable with the unfamiliar—and when he tries to slide his dick inside her she looks as if she's genuinely suffering.

"Sorry," she gasps, pressing at his chest. "Sorry—I need a minute."

He gets off and watches her hurriedly dress, yank her jeans back over her narrow hips and small ass. Her legs are thin, just as delicate, and Viktor notes how she’s only a waif compared to him. Was she afraid he’d crush her? He sees the glimmer of tears in her eyes.

"It's not you," she sniffles, at his dismayed expression, squeezing his hand in assurance. "It's my head," she promises. "I just need to clear my head."

Viktor notes the way she picks up her phone—out of restless habit. Like she’s looking for an escape from his company. There's an anxiety to her as she, sitting on the edge of his bed, scrolls through open messages on her phone, fingers agitatedly swiping.

"Is it...something else?"

And of course by _something_ Viktor means _someone_, but Hermione can’t understand this. She just stares at him, brow scrunched, and Krum feels that broaching the subject may have been stupid altogether when he knows there aren’t any ex-boyfriends in her life. The only human being she keeps any contact with is her sibling.

"Just going to take a walk. I'll be back,” Hermione says, nodding at him, and then, more awkwardly, at his half-mast cock. She reaches, a bit reluctantly, and gives it a brief, affectionate squeeze. "I can figure this out. Just…keep that thing out for me."

'That thing'. Although he feels thoroughly embarrassed, Viktor has to laugh.

Hermione is so terse and matter-of-fact about sex, but there is something endearing about this whole situation. He's never met a girl quite like her.

He can be patient. He wants to see this through.

And it seems he is duly rewarded for his efforts, because when Hermione returns, she is much more confident than before. Her eyes squeezed shut, she kisses him quickly, abrasively on the mouth, and he pulls her into the bed and the next few minutes are everything Viktor could want them to be. Hermione suddenly turns into those girls from the pornos, loud and enthusiastic. Just like them, in fact. She says all the right things to make Viktor finish really, really fast. And then his fantasy gets better. Then her hands are on him. Her hands, her dexterous, agile fingers—are _glorious_. Her technique is otherworldly. Hermione does things with her hands he's never had any girl do before.

"Satisfied?" she asks, hopefully.

"Yeah," he pants, laying eagle spread, still recovering from the best handjob-induced orgasm he's ever had. "When the hell did you learn that?"

She goes bright pink.

"I looked up techniques on my phone a few minutes ago," she says, hilariously awkward. "I, uh, just needed to study up."

Viktor stares, realizing he's in the presence of genius. 

"Marry me," he breathes.

Viktor’s girlfriend is peculiar. He loves her, and fully intends to marry her, but she's peculiar. It has been many months now. He thinks they have a decent sex life, regular and lustily uncomplicated, on weekdays in the morning before they wake before the concerns of the working day penetrate their heavy bedroom curtains. It seems like she loves him too, because she is always caring, loyal, attentive, one lazy morning will nurse him tenderly after he breaks his leg and wrist in a match. She pleasures him, sits astride him, takes her time, while he lays grinning. She is a good girlfriend, no one would dispute that. It's not devotion she lacks but passion.

Krum has noted the...gaps. The tendency to withdraw, get caustic, to shut down at the slightest bit of criticism. It is quite clear why Hermione hasn't been in a relationship before. Or even had many friends.

She doesn't understand how to behave _at all._

Their first fight is memorable, because it happens in the morgue. Viktor has driven through a snowstorm battling hours of traffic, and now stands in front of his whitecoat girlfriend while she dissects a dead body.

"Hermione," he says, voice raised. "You need to tell me if you’re staying late for work. All I'm asking for is _one text_. So I don't end up worrying—"

"Okay," she snaps at him, and Viktor is surprised at the sheer _hostility_ in her tone.

He watches her inhale. Exhale. Squeeze her eyes. "Sure,” she whispers, apologetically. “Fine. Sorry."

"Where's your head right now Hermione?"

"I don't know." She stares miserably, helplessly down at her gloved fingers, playing with the latex. A habit that means she wants this conversation to end.

Abruptly, she says, "You should break up with me."

She looks up, and at his enquiring, privately hurt stare, she adds, "Because I make you miserable."

"You don't," he says, reaching to clasp her shoulder. She recoils, takes a step away—creating distance between them. Bridging it quickly, he objects, "It's okay if we fight sometimes."

She swallows a sob—a horrible, wounded sound that makes him want to just carry her home.

"I'm a bitch," she whispers, wiping her eyes at her sleeve. "I'm wretched."

"You're not."

"I'm no better than my mother," she insists bitterly. 

All Viktor knows about Jane is that she was addicted to pills and fell in love with the monstrous Riddle Senior. Hermione hated them both.

Viktor steps at her. Slopes one hand around her waist, takes her gloved hand in the other, and says, "I don't think you’ll ever be like your mother."

She wipes at her eyes again and shrugs. 

"Hermione," he prompts, swiping his thumb at the tear crawling down her cheek. He wants to tell her it's okay to have these vulnerable talks with him. That he can't know her unless she gives him _permission_ to know her. That he...well he... 

"I love you," he says the words without hesitation and in the sort of bold, awkward way he hopes will make her melt.

Her eyes grow as wide as saucers. Hermione looks alarmed.

You love...me?" She sounds incredulous. "Why?"

"Why not?" he laughs, folding a stray curl behind her ear.

She stares as if there's something wrong with _him_.

"You have a good heart," she intones, stepping out of his arms, and returns to carving the carcass. "But I think you should break up with me. I... don't want to feel bad about myself."

“How am I making you feel bad?”

“You’re not making me feel bad,” she says, eyes screwed in concentration, fingers carving flesh. “I just _feel_ bad. I… can’t help the way I am.”

_I can't help the way I am. _Viktor, from his extensive dating experience, knows that this is code for _I'm not interested in changing for you. _Still he wants to make this work. 

"Can we—compromise?" he says agreeably. "Work on these issues together. Instead of breaking up?"

Hermione gives a limp shrug of the shoulders, her hands trained on the cadaver. Viktor thinks it’s silly that her first and only solution to the slightest bit of social discomfort is ‘breaking-up’.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short background chapter, I know. Hope you enjoyed though.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First two scenes are parent flashbacks but otherwise we pick up right from ch 7 so skim that real quick if you don't remember what happened.

Riddle Senior treated his son as a man even when he was far too young to accept the burden.

He took Tom everywhere. To the bathroom: this is how you hold your dick to pee. The store: this is how you con men a dollar at a time. Driving lessons: this is how you silver-tongue your way out of a ticket. The bank: this is how you falsify records for tax evasion. School: a great place to 'practice' when you're just starting out. _They don't even have metal detectors at the doors!_ Though the lax standards of public schooling did not impress Riddle Senior, who would educate his child himself, taking Tom on ‘fieldtrips’ to prisons and court hearings. Laws, Father said, are guidelines written by the powerful and the stupid, and this (he said, with an elegant arm splayed at the empty courtroom, the dock in which the accused sits during proceedings) is where the failures end up, those that cannot play the game. _Never make the mistake of settling for a subpar alibi. A bad alibi is worse than the best prosecutor in the country. _Father showed Tom how to hold his first knife and fire his first gun and how to make poisons from affordable household ingredients. _Lithium Chloride has low toxicity and is not an effective way to kill so why would Gellert— _Tom was a chemist before he even entered the first grade. 

Some nights, in the chill of a nightmare, Tom feels seven years old again. Sitting on the cement steps of that little home, a wilting dandelion flower by his hand, growing from the same little cracked place it always did. 

Father sits two steps above, elbow inclined on bent knee with a suave movie-star flair. A tilt of head, and the gelled locks will tousle to the side. Perfect timing, perfect poise; all his motions are out of a movie Tom isn't yet old enough to see. Father is the cardboard cutout of a man—shiny and paper-thin. In his mid-thirties, his face has no lines due to an obsessive, daily ten-step skincare routine. He wears well-fitted designer suits, and he waxes his chest, and he bleaches his teeth, and probably other body parts too.

Father is a criminal, a mastermind, and a monster.

"Junior." Father smiles at him, with his blinding set of teeth. "I've met a woman with the same hobbies. Do you think I should marry?"

Eyes buried in the book on his lap, Tom's voice comes clipped: "Stop." Reproachful_._ “Shut up.”

An elbow nudges playfully at his ribs. "Why not? It’s something all the other people do."

Tom swipes dust off the weathered pages of _The Prince _by Niccolò Machiavelli. He wants to say: _Other people, yes. Not **you**. _It's too surreal to imagine his Father in monogamy even if it is a pretend game of monogamy. These moods of whimsy have never suited Tom, who is not up for the latest charade in a lifetime of charades. _Marriage_. A stupid-sounding word. Tom is going into the second grade soon and would rather spend the rest of his summer finishing his long reading list than worrying about the next target of his Father’s romantic musings. _But I'm really in love this time! _Father can fool the world, can fool himself, but he _cannot_ fool Tom.

Tom has better things to apply his mind towards, like building his first computer, for instance.

But Father’s games come first. Tom's childhood has passed in the shadow of a man that is larger than life, larger than any other entity; a space wherein judges and presidents and popes have no jurisdiction. Even if Tom has often wished he could grow up in an orphanage, with all the lucky kids who don’t have to deal with a father, and though he has asked—bargained, many times—his Father will not disown him. Father says you can’t abandon your sons no matter how much you might dislike them or vice versa. 

“Only your girlfriends,” Father says. “Girlfriends are easy to get a restraining order against. But sons are DNA. Not only do they make an excellent alibi, they’ll grow up to resent you if you abandon them."

"So what?" Tom snaps, not understanding why this would matter. 

"_So_, Junior. If I abandon you, and you grow up angry like all the young people are doing these days, then someday you’ll return to kill me," comes the sagely response. "In fact it would be your prerogative to do so."

Tom often wonders if he was made in Father's lab, in a petri dish. It seems impossible to imagine his Father to be capable of fornication or any action that requires physical contact with another human being. It all sounds so disturbing to his ears. 

“That's stupid,” this small Tom pipes. "What would be the point in killing you?”

Father shrugs an unobtrusive shoulder. “There doesn't always have to be a _point_ to the things we do,” he says. "Impulse is far more compelling than reason."

"But there should be a point to the things we do _— _don't you think?"

"That's a very naive worldview to have, Junior." Father's laugh is as low as it is patronizing as it is humorless.

Tom flinches off the hand that lands at his back. He flips a page of his book, and says, “Then at least let me run away." 

“No," comes a bored drone, as that hand rearranges Tom's hair, fingers combing back the overgrown strands that hang at the young boy's brooding eyes. "Too many pedophiles out there. Go to your room instead. Brush your teeth_— _keep them shiny.” There is no lilt of authority to his Father's voice as Tom stands to sulk off – 'grounded' for the evening. It is delivered with the same lack of_ anything _that everything always has been and always will be.

A black hole. 

And Tom knows, this is Father's most authentic self. 

He wakes a second time in another dream, trapped in sleep-paralysis. One year later, eight years old, in his bedroom listening to the sound of Jane humming.

The song is meandering, tuneless—the absent-minded sort of lullaby you hum to yourself when no one else can hear you. It sounds at first as though the song is coming from very far away, and Tom strains to hear it—the rise and fall of his stepmother's voice and the familiar rustles and clicks as she putters about a room, obsessively tidying and straightening. Wired from the amphetamines.

The song is a bastardization of Jack and Jill.

“_Tom and 'Mione went up the hill to fetch a pail of water_,” Jane sings, her voice childish and deceptively-sweet and high. “_Tom fell down and broke his crown—_” The song fades into a hum again, one melody shifting into another. Her footsteps move away, and Tom hears the snick of a door closing behind him.

He feels a painful swell in his throat.

Pills ( _lithium chloride _) crammed inside his mouth.

He is suffocating.

He begins to sink, fingers clawing at his throat, slipping down through his sheets and pillows and cushions and deep into the dark.

It is an extraordinary idea and Tom thinks about it for a long time. So simple, so bizarre, a poor boy and a rich man competing.

A tale as old as time. 

Gellert knows more about him than he's let on. 

It is the _only_ explanation for —

"Lithium Chloride," a sibilant hiss leaves Tom’s breath, amid a maddening pace across his apartment, in reference to what was found in the pills confiscated from Harry, "is _not _lethal to ingest. Not common pill composition. Will cause vomiting, poor coordination, sleepiness, and ringing in the ears. _Not_ a drug with which to sedate a child. _Will_ make the child sick but _won't_ render unconscious or kill—" Or Tom wouldn't have lived past ten years of age. "So why would Gellert—"

Murder isn't a particularly refined goal. Any thug can kill. 

No, Gellert's agenda is surely more sophisticated.

In a matter of hours, Tom’s room has become a den of investigation. Papers litter every flat surface, scribbled with fragments of code. On the page at his table the letters **L I C L** are written out, being treated as if they are hieroglyphics, the inception of a riddle, heavily imbedded cryptography. Because if Gellert has access to Tom's records and has been retracing the past, then surely he must know by now _what_ Tom studied in school — and _why_ he was expelled.

Skidding back into his computer chair, Tom yanks his headphones on, furiously coding on a Linux command line. His fingers take quick breaks to sip his Diet Coke. The screen of his laptop flickers on the admin page on the 'Deathly Hallows' site. Further decryption efforts have brought him back.

He'll need to authenticate himself to access the rest.

Which means he needs a password. 

"Of course," he murmurs, eyes manically flicking through his jotted letters and numbers on scraps, mind searching for a subset of those letters that may fit a conjugacy class or pattern or—a word.

Yes, lets keep it simple, a _word_.

Gellert's code is strange, very strange, because it's not streams of static code. It is ever changing. But there is deliberate design to its evolution. The same numbers vanish and reappear — 23, 1, 24, 25 — in that order. Tom sorts through his mental library of cryptographic puzzles. A one-time pad? One-time pads are like condoms, intended for singular use. One hit. One fix. They're used by nations for critical military communication that can only be seen once. 

That also means Tom has _one chance_ to get this right. 

He reclines in his chair, jaw drawn tight, his fingers drumming aggressively against the table. He feels back at Yale, in a lecture of Professor Dumbledore's crowded with the nation's leading mathematicians-in-progress. The boys and girls with minds like engines, near perfect standardized test scores, with absolutely no social sense, as befitting any class taught by the esteemed professor. And there's Tom sitting in the back, darkened eyes, overly medicated and half-conscious, with a hoodie drawn over his head and absolutely _too much_ to prove—

_Mr. Riddle, since you were the **only one** to do the homework **correctly**, please come to the board and s_ _how us how to solve this cipher. _

_Explain to the rest of your class why **they're** wrong. _

"Certainly Professor," Tom utters under his breath, amid the _scritch-scratch_ of a felt tip pen, feverishly scribbling errant numbers on blank paper, breaking them apart and processing the fragments with the appropriate sections of his brain. His mind whirs with probabilities."They're wrong. You're wrong too. You're _all_ wrong because—" his mouth twitches to a snarl. "You're not _me_." 

Four letter code. 

If 23 1 24 25 is the _message_, then L I C L is surely the _key_. So if he assigns each letter a numerical value, if "A" is 1, "B" is 2, then...

A few minutes pass.

He's got something. 

KRUM. The cipher spells KRUM.

The gay husband? Tom's hesitant, but he'll try it.

He plugs the name—password—into the small bar and the site opens to reveal a greentext screen: 

> CONGRATULATIONS **[V0ld3m0rT]** ! YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED TO OUR NEXT NETWORKING EVENT ON JULY 24th. PLEASE CONTACT YOUR LIASON FOR FURTHER DETAILS.

Tom claws an inked hand through a rumpled, half-standing tuft of hair. Barks a laugh of mad triumph. 

After seven laborious hours, he's solved it. Whatever _‘it’_ is.

"Hermione I've finally hacked the—" Tom stops short as he spins around, peering irritably through his darkened apartment. The place is empty of human presence, only the cream-colored carpets and the sterile colored walls remain.

His sister has gone and taken the child with her. 

Tom remembers their fight from the morning. Grinding her cunt. Shouting at her to _'Get out'_

"Great," he hisses, reclining in his chair, shoulders slumping. He needs Hermione in the room to hurl flirtations at while he makes notes, crosses ideas, and pursues alternative explanations. He needs his sister to help brainstorm a—what would a doctor call it? — yes, a _differential diagnosis_. Could it be this simple? Is the ‘liaison’ Krum?

Tom wants to call his sister and tell her to _haul her ass over. _

Standing, he stretches his arms in the air with an arrogant yawn, before stalking to the bathroom. Outrage beats in every step. Who told Hermione to leave? He did_—_that's not the point. He wants her in his lap, angrily grinding that soft, tender _bare_ cunt against his _bare_ cock. He'll settle for nothing less than warm, wet, lurid _cunt_ contact. Stupid, irritating sister. He'll tear that stupid skirt off himself if he has to. 

He undresses, turns the bath faucet on, slinks behind the curtain. The lather of soap can't scrub the _feel _of her cunt from his body. Softest, plushiest vulva in existence. Mint condition. Barely even used. 

He knows Hermione will forgive him if he goes about this correctly, because it has already been seven hours of static silence—which means she's looking for an excuse to see him again. No matter how far he pushes her, she will always circle back to him.

That is a sister's nature.

Turning the shower tap off when he finishes, the mist of warm water clouds his bathroom mirror. Tom leans a muscled arm at the sink basin, glaring at his fogged reflection, swiping a blade along his jawline with deliberate care. Next he washes and applies his face cream with fine-tuned finger circling precision. Then follows a thrice fold layering of an anti-wrinkle cream at the delicate skin surrounding his eyes, smoothing into the faint creases at the ends. He slicks whitening strips on both sets of his very straight teeth, and clips his eyebrows until they look the _right_ sort of masculine— until he is satisfied with how he looks: youthful, effortless, distinctly 'Tom Riddle'.

Age is a vice in a society that worships youth. Kings and philosophers through the ages have sought the secret to immortality by stupid, drastic means.

Tom Riddle, to his own knowledge, has already found the modern solution.

Putting his anti-wrinkle cream aside, fingers grab at his phone. He fires the first text, if only to test the waters:

**See what happens when you wear a skirt around me?**

Her response—takes a few minutes—but is swift, incisive:

_Go burn in hell._

The waters are very murky. 

Bath towel slung over his shoulders, Tom growls irritably as he stares at the screen. His left hand has already begun to creep down his abdomen.

In retrospect—flirtation has never been the best way to begin an apology. 

Though he still isn't sure what he's apologizing for. Making Hermione aware that she's in need of a vigorous fucking? It's evident to all except the gay husband.

At her next message his chest tightens.

Hermione has written: _I hate you. _

A heaviness creaks over his ribs.

She's distraught. Damage control is in order. He will reel her in before she spirals, before she decides she never wants to see her pervert brother again. Tom won't be abandoned over something as stupid as a biological impulse.

He types:

**Hermione, I'm sorry. **

He isn't sorry, and she won't be convinced.

_You're an irreverent bastard, you know that? You have no morals._

Of course she would make this about morals.

_The problem is that you just don't care, Tom. About_ _women, about family...about me. _

Tom glares at his phone, his breath hissing through his teeth, and retaliates: 

**You're the one who sat in my lap. **

_I was trying to feed you. _

Fuck her for playing naive. She thinks he's a fool?

_A good brother wouldn't take advantage of the situation. _

'Good brother'. Her cunt wants to cum and she says 'good brother'. 

Fine. On both accounts.

**Come over tonight. I'll make it up to you. **

**I'll buy your favorite wine. **

Getting his sister drunk so that she can fling terrible insults at him again is the most Tom can do. Normalcy needs reestablishing. 

Though her response is less than ideal: 

_Can't. I have dinner with Viktor's family. _

His mouth twists. _Viktor's family_, what an insulting, imbecilic set of words.

**Can't you skip it?**

Reverting to the younger sibling, he adds:

**I'm not feeling well.**

_What's wrong with you now???_

**Splinter. **

**Your surgical expertise is required.**

**I'll let you saw my hand off**.

Tom knows his sister's glaring at the screen swallowing her exasperation; but she'll cave to the nostalgia he inspires.

_You're a dramatic bastard, you know that?_

_I hate you._

This time the words don't make his chest ache. Tom refuses.

Hermione pretending to hate him is the same as an alcoholic pretending not to drink. Which just means he has to get her drunk tonight. 

** _Say you'll come over._ **

_Fine._

**Yes?**

_Yes, sure. _

_I'll come. _

_I'll tell Viktor I have a family emergency._

Tom's mouth twitches to a triumphant smirk. 'Family emergency' may as well be his nickname.

(Gellert's digging through his past—but not the details you'd find in public records about Tom Riddle. _Lithium Chloride was in the pills that **Jane** fed Tom._ Gellert has details that no one save family could know, details Tom's own mind has obscured. Details that allow his childhood to remain a blurry fugue, a distant memory. Gellert cannot _possibly_ know these details. Unless—)

"Hermione—I found a flower!”

The boy holds out the dandelion, with a gleeful chocolate covered grin, standing beneath the canopy of the tree outside the hospital where he's just gotten a CT scan, showing no concussion, thank god—Adults that hit children deserve to burn. Because Harry did a good job staying calm during the scan, Hermione has treated him to ice cream.

"My prince charming," Hermione says, with a smile, taking the dandelion from Harry’s hand. She blows on its feathery seeds, watching them glide away in the air. Before Harry can go chasing she pulls him into her arms in a tight, protective, smothering embrace. It's embarrassing; she's a grown woman and not his mother and should know the implications. Motherhood frightens Hermione. Motherhood makes monsters. It does not call to her. Not in the way fatherhood calls to Viktor, who has pressed for kids, not now, but someday. Her husband, tall, dark haired, an athlete, lopsidedly square-jawed, with a toothy game-for-anything expression that charms most people, wants a family with her, but she isn’t sure she can stomach the thought. She should be more optimistic. This is what people do, isn’t it?

Any passerby will think she is Harry’s mother today. It helps that Harry doesn't seem to mind her egregious displays of affection. 

"What did you wish for?" the boy says, in her lap, comfortably resting with his temple pressed to her chest.

"What I always wish for." Hermione rustles through her purse, removing a wet wipe, and uses the opportunity to clean the edges of his dirtied mouth. "For my brother to eat again."

"How come Tom won't eat?" Harry looks up, his brow puckered. 

"Don't know." Hermione wipes the smidge on his nose. "After college Tom and I lived together. In that time we fought a lot, because Tom's—well, Tom's _Tom_, but at least he was good about eating. But since we’ve moved apart, he's completely stopped..." Her voice grows strangulated with emotion. "Sometimes I think he does it just to punish me..."

Harry's eyes widen.

Sticky chocolate fingers rub the stray tear trickling down her cheek, and he assuages with a, "I’ll never stop eating, Hermione, promise. You can feed me _until I explode_." He makes an elaborate motion for the explosion of his torso, complete with sound effect.

She gives a sniffling laugh and grabs another wet wipe, to clean his hands. "Deal," she says, removing a small sanitizer bottle, squeezing a dollop in both their hands. She rubs her hands to show Harry how it’s done. "So what do we get for lunch?"

Harry rubs the sanitizer in his hands with glee. "Pizza please."

So that's their next destination. Hermione knows the hospital cafeteria has decent food, and a section for pizza, and although she’s never tried it, as she tends to eat meals by herself in her office, she wagers it is worth the effort today. With the boy at hand, she navigates the halls, through the sea of patients and fellow employees, cutting corner after corner, avoiding nosy stares, flashes of recognition ("Oh look, there goes Dr. Hermione Riddle!"), which are often followed by remarks ("Looks tired" or "Not particularly chatty" or "Probably just finished a surgery, don’t want to bother her"). Her ID card swings clumsily against her blouse.

As Harry eats, Hermione sits, idly stroking his hair. Until she feels Dr. Amos Diggory catch her eye. He makes his way over.

“Hello dear,” says the aged anesthesiologist. Spotting Harry, he smiles. “And who’s the handsome little one?”

There’s no reason for an adult to wander around with a ‘handsome’ minor that isn’t theirs. She doesn’t like when grown men use that word for children. Or women, for that matter, because women can be just as bad as men if you give them permission to be. Wasn’t Jane just as frightening as Riddle Senior? Something about that word ‘handsome’ still itches her. _Your brother is such a handsome little boy, Hermione. _A tooth in the back of her skull. _Keep your brother away from Jane, Hermione. _She should have taken Harry to the police station, filled out a missing child report, done the responsible adult thing by now. She hasn’t.

How to get herself out of this.

“My—nephew,” slips her mouth, without thought.

Diggory’s grey brows raise, alarmed. “Tom has a kid?”

_Sure. _It feels easier to extend the lack of social responsibility to Tom. Her brother is promiscuous, almost as if in opposition to her. He’s slept with too many girls over the years, just to prove that he can, sometimes two or three at once, as Hermione recalls—but really really wishes she _didn’t_—from their days living together. Tom is a bastard, and his bastard behavior is just a consequence of life; it doesn't make her ache, just makes her skin prickle, because she is nearing thirty and can't keep hurting over the same hurt. It’s much more believable that, between the pair of them, Tom would have an out-of-wedlock child...As if he needed another way to disappoint her. 

“I wanted to ask you,” Diggory says, as he sits, taking Hermione's hands in his, with a paternal air he isn’t entitled to. “How are you feeling, dear?”

She stares at her plate of pizza. She hates this mode of questioning. She hates being psycho-analysed._ How are you feeling? Why are you crying? Is it Tom again? Want to talk about it while I rub your shoulders or eat you out?_ Viktor will also pry when she’s in her head for too long.

“Just another day,” she offers, with a controlled smile, a nice way of saying _none of your business._

“Aha, and how are things in the brother department?”

Things are never well in the brother department. The brother department has been robbed, caught on fire, and been struck by lightning all this morning. It is the _last_ thing Hermione wants to talk about with the benign Dr. Diggory.

“Ever since you mentioned your parents, Hermione, I—well, you can imagine I’ve been worried. I don’t think you’re coping well _at all_.”

Hermione feels her shoulders wilt. She’s not doing well? She’s never once made a mistake in surgery. Never once called off work or taken an extended vacation, not even for her honeymoon. She’s been punctual, proficient, devoted. She’s as functional as she’s ever been. How can someone say she’s not doing well?

How much more can she possibly do?

“I reached out on your behalf,” Dr. Diggory says, with slight apologetic air. “To a psychiatrist. One that just transferred to the hospital. Has an intimidating name, but charming guy, I promise, great people skills, met him this morning—you just _happened_ to come up in conversation.” Diggory pauses at the disbelief in her eyes, and insists, “I told him what a _brilliant_ young surgeon you are, Hermione, truly, and how lucky we are to have you here with us, but that you _have_ had some hardships in life that it may help you to talk to a professional about…” Reaching into his pocket, he takes out a card, and with an imploring smile, beckons, “Here—give it a try, please?”

Hermione stares at the card, at the name:

Dr. GELLERT GRINDELWALD

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorta half the update? I should have the second half ironed out in like the next day here.


	10. Chapter 10

Harry won't go in the office with her. He clings at her leg like he’s _afraid_.

Maybe because the psychiatric corridor of the hospital feels like something out of a horror movie. Grim and cold with an undertone of bleach, walls scraped from hundreds of trolleys, fizzling bulbs washing them in scattershot light. Nowhere is the chronic underfunding more evident than in this hallway_—_yet they've just hired a new doctor.

'Gellert Grindelwald'

A name Hermione knows nothing about. 

She crouches, zips a shivering Harry's jacket up to his chin. "I’ll be—” A glance at her wristwatch. “—less than ten minutes. Just want to see if he can help me.”

The boy gives a soft nod, nose tinged pink. Post-lunch he is restless, eager to return to Tom, specifically to Tom's lap. _Please please please_..._I miss him! S_he has no idea what's spurred the emotion in Harry.

“Later_—_he’s in an asshole mood,” she says.

“What’s an ‘asshole’ mood?” 

“Don’t repeat that word.” Chiding Harry proves useless, who swiftly swipes the phone from her jacket, googling the definition himself. The curiosity is charming, almost Tom-like, and Hermione leans on her knees to press a soft, fluttering kiss at his cheek. She feels overwhelmingly fond and painfully protective. She has no idea why, but she knows it will hurt her very much if she can’t keep Harry safe. 

Her eyes close, still ruminating over what Amos said.

_I don't think you're doing well at all. _

The mind is—millions of interconnected neurons, chemical and electrical impulses, a world unto itself. The mind is complex.

And maybe hers is broken. 

Some call psychiatry a _quack science. _She’s heard it in conversation with colleagues: _Psychiatry isn’t real medicine—just a pill mill. Sullied by the reckless over diagnosing of the normal human experience._

Hermione doesn't know if she fits this 'normal human experience'. But even if she can’t quite fit it, the last thing she wants is a ‘diagnosis’. She wishes she could just treat herself. Take apart her own circuitry—vessel and blood and bone—and make herself anew, maybe even a little prettier: the girl Viktor probably wanted to marry.

Carve with a blade into her mind, remove the tooth gnarled between the interstices. 

It is her mother's tooth.

Hermione can still remember that night.

She is twelve, old enough to know what _wrong_ looks like. 

She is twelve, practically an _adult_, while Tom is only nine, still just a _child_, and Jane, perpetually wired from amphetamines is—in her brother’s room.

It is dark, dead sleeping hours, and Riddle Senior is asleep.

Crouched outside, from the small keyhole, Hermione can see Tom sitting at the edge of his bed, pale and bleak, pills in palm. The fearful twitch of his small shoulder where Jane’s saw-edged fingernails curl. The woman cooing, seductively, at his ear:

_“What a **handsome**_ _little boy you are…” _

Hermione remembers sleepless nights sitting outside her little brother's door. Guarding from _wrong_.

She remembers the icy hardwood beneath her numb legs. The heavy flicker of her aching lids, the passing thud of adult feet—terror coiled thick and tight and wretched in her stomach. She remembers Tom pulling her inside _(mumbling 'idiot' under his breath)_, curling them up together on his bed. His arms round her back, her chin at his shoulder, two bodies shivering beneath the blankets. In the morning, the relief of hearing him breathe: “Jane didn’t come.”

She's glad to find that Dr. Grindelwald is—_old_. 

Simple. Conventional. Fatherly.

Sitting at his dimmed desk, spectacles hanging on the rim of his aquiline nose, he flicks through the pages of a Bible, uttering passages under his breath. A religious man. Old-fashioned but Hermione wagers she can deal with that. There are worse things to be. A photo, of a blonde wife and daughter, sits at his desk, next to a small fishing trophy, next to a ballcap that reads NASCAR—this may just be, Hermione deigns to think, the most stereotypical straight man alive. But a daughter means he must be good with women, must be humane. The fantasy of a cut-throat handsome doctor is appealing, but in real life, you want someone experienced and kind, who will handle your psychological vomit with the least discomfort possible.

She shakes his hand, limp and self-conscious, feeling stupid. Here she is, twenty-eight-year old woman, still in the infancy of adulthood. Married, and still alone. “Hello. Sorry to bother you, I’m—”

“Afternoon, Dr. Riddle." He inclines his head in greeting. He gestures toward the empty sofa. "Still Riddle? Or is it Krum, now?”

She sinks into cushions, her finger swiping over her wedding band. “I…Riddle. Didn’t change my name.”

“Interesting.” He putters about his office with a cane. “Tea?” He pours a cup from a steaming kettle.

Hermione takes it and sniffs it, though she has no reason to. A childhood habit. “Thank you.” She takes a sip. Warm, chamomile, soothing. No lithium chloride, or she would know. 

“How do you like it here so far?” she asks.

“I like it well enough,” comes his calm, steady response, amid the shuffle of papers and files, undermining her measly stab at small talk. This doctor is bland. All business. Hermione is fine with that. A good doctor will keep boundaries—walls. Walls are necessary for people like Hermione.

“So why didn’t you change your name?” he repeats the question, settling in his reclined chair, legs folded, cupping his knee. Facing her he speaks in a genial, easy tone, like he’s asking about the weather.

“I…” Her lower lip grazes cool china. Why didn’t she? Viktor had wanted her to. But she refused. Said she couldn’t because—

“I have trouble letting things go, I guess.”

_Names, people, grudges._

“And what about 'Wilkins'?”

The tea scorches her tongue. It burns like acid, her mother’s maiden name. 

“Don't like it” she whispers, her shoulders bunching. "Never did."

“Because you didn’t like your mother?” 

Not even thirty seconds and he's gotten to the crux of her. She must be so damn easy to read. A textbook case of arrested development.

“We don’t get to choose our parents, doctor.”

Hearing the soft hitch in her voice, he graciously holds a tissue box out. “No we don’t,” he says, with far too much sympathy, as she dabs her eyes. “We make do with the ones we have. Don’t we?”

“Exactly.” She blows her nose discretely—unattractively—into a tissue.

She feels the single-minded focus of Grindelwald’s gaze on her now. His eyes are fixed intensely on her face. Prolonged contact with the steely grey makes her turn to the window.

"Why did you hate your mother so much?" The doctor's voice is as loose and mild as the tea in her cup.

"Because.” _She gave birth to me. _"She was a bad mother. She fell in love with a psychopath."

"But why hate her? Why not hate your stepfather?"

"I hate him too. He was brutal. He _also_ fell in love with a psychopath."

"Like attracts like," Grindelwald says, almost musingly. She turns back to him, but his face is unreadable, half in shadow. "I suppose… _some_ would find that romantic."

Hermione gives a dead, blunt look. "I don't find anything romantic about mental illness," she says with harsh bitterness. "Life isn’t a movie. Real people get hurt. Broken harmful people need treatment…It's an injustice to humanity to think otherwise."

"Spoken like a physician.” The corner of Grindelwald's mouth quirks, whether in offense or interest she can’t be sure. “So tell me, do you believe your parents also deserved treatment?"

“I believe they deserved execution.”

“My, my,” the doctor hums, almost joyfully jotting down a note. “Not an ounce of forgiveness in you, is there?” 

"I'm not interested in learning to forgive my parents,” she says, letting anger mask the tremor in her voice. “They were monsters. I’ll hate them until the day I die.”

The doctor smiles a little, hollow, and white as bone.

"Good, Hermione—I'm not interested in _teaching_ you forgiveness." 

"Then what can you teach me?"

Grindelwald leans in, chin steepled on fingers. “We’ll get there.” He gives an almost-imperceptible wink. “Let’s keep talking. Now, tell me about your brother…”

When Hermione’s not in the lab stealing the hearts of cadavers, she is normally planning her next dissection. She carves endless patterns of blood and tissue in her mind, tracks complex pathways from one vessel to another. Dead men are as fascinating as the living—sometimes they are more—that’s a given, but it’s not an _excuse_. Unlike her brother, she’s not interested in the process of _allowing_ one to become a cadaver; that’s a failure to follow the Hippocratic oath. It is why Tom could never be a doctor: he has no empathy. A doctor must save a patient’s life _no matter what. _Hermione, who takes her job very seriously, has never let a patient die.

That evening she’s in her brother's apartment washing dishes after dinner, trying to focus on the mundane chore at hand. Harry has fallen asleep on the sofa after eating his fill of spaghetti, curled up in a precious little ball, while Tom—morally defunct bastard that he is—is in the process of undoing all the measly good faith he has earned.

“An annoying habit of yours,” he murmurs over her shoulder, nose nudged at her cheek, breath hot at her skin, as she sponges a dirty plate. “Handling my messes. Being _responsible_.”

Hermione shivers, as the weight of his large arm settles around her waist. The chill of the running water between her fingers and the slow, creeping exhaustion in her bones is taking its toll.

Tom is glittering tonight—every inch of him crafted for tactile manipulation or what those don’t know him would call ‘seduction’. Since their last encounter, it’s as if a switch in his brain has flipped on. His crisp white shirt is cut close to his torso. His trousers are tailored in some ridiculous way that shows off the lean lines of his legs. His black hair is styled as if a million sensual hands have been running through it. He smells of a smoky cologne that’s overwhelming when he leans in close, which he’s been deliberately doing all evening. 

"Stop that." She nudges his ribs with a sharp elbow. In retaliation he positions his right leg to wrap hers, his bare foot softly rubbing up and down her bare calf, his hand splayed wide over her stomach. "And what am I doing, hm?" he says, his voice a low, gravelly hum.

Hermione sighs.

She spins around.

"You shaved today," she retorts, gaze clamoring his jaw. "Missed a spot though."

He leans in, eyes gleaming in humor. "Did I?" 

"Idiot,” she says, lightly smacking his cheek. “I'll get it.” Her hand’s already pawing at a drawer to grab his best cut-throat knife. Tom’s dark eyes linger, the way they always do, as she wets the tip of her thumb with her mouth to brush over his scruff. Holding his face, angling it, she swipes the blade across the skin on the underside of his jaw. "There. Clean."

"Oof." Tom grins wryly, dusting the spot on his jaw with his thumb. "Almost cut me."

“I’d never.”

“That so?” Shifting his weight against her, pressing her to the sink, Tom angles his head and tilts it down to hers. It’s a tease, a _taunt_, the way the thick fringe of his lashes tangles hers, and his hot, minty breath smothers her lower lip, and makes her feel like—

A fool. The word is _fool_. 

Just as his arm tries to snake her waist, she slips away. Glass and wine bottle in hand, she makes her way to the balcony, thoroughly annoyed and huffing, under her breath, "You always miss the same spot—you're godawful at a close shave." 

"Good thing I have you." Tom slinks in her steps, leaning his head languidly against the door pane to watch her. "To clean me up, knives and all."

She pours herself a full, well-deserved glass—she's been dealing with Glittering Tom for several hours now—and drinks it in one go; the harsh tart makes her throat ache. The night is young and horrible just like her brother, sodden clouds lingering with anticipation of storm. Unpleasant things are always lurking at the horizon. As if in preparation, she grimly pours a second glass.

"And what if you didn't have me anymore," she hiccups, the sound dry and humorless.

"I suppose I'd die." 

"That's not funny." She shoots a glare.

Tom, whose face is perfectly shadowed in the night ambiance, shrugs loosely against the pane. "You asked," he says. 

She leans her chin down on the ledge, scratching at the back of her head. _I suppose I’d die. _What a cruel thing to say. Tom has always known how to make her itch. 

"What am I going to do with you?" she mumbles, swirling the red in her glass.

Tom's mouth gives a deviant twitch. 

"Shut up." Her head snaps to glare again. 

"Then don't ask," he repeats and moves at her, reaching for the wine with the arm he curls around her shoulders.

Her fingers grip his wrist in a silent _‘Don’t’_.

At his raised brows, she warns, "Won't play well with your medication."

Tom’s jaw tightens, an involuntary movement she registers as frustration, but he surrenders the bottle. He sinks one hand in his pocket with a graceful carelessness.

"You get to escape reality without me then," he says, sordidly. 

"You'll manage," she assures, taking a long drink, and he laughs lowly, stroking one of her stray curls with his knuckles. 

A full minute of playing with her hair, he says, without any sort of preamble:

"Do you remember who killed my father?"

He brings it up in such a casual way, as if he's asking about tomorrow's weather. 

Hermione leans at the ledge, looking out into the night, feeling hollow. Below the city flows in its tense way, bustling and honking, but ten floors up she is far enough removed from it to be a passive observer.

“Why? Did you want to send them a gift basket?” She drains the last drops of her wine. 

Leaning on the ledge beside her, Tom shrugs a shoulder. “Maybe I do,” he says.

“Why does it matter now? Let the dead stay dead.”

It's a dodgy response and he finds it inept. She knows because he studies her for a long hard moment, eyes dark, his face stripped of any pretense of emotion. “And what about Jane?” he says.

A chill on the balcony.

“What _about_ Jane?” she says.

“She vanished. Never to be heard from again.” Tom watches her eyes, as if searching them for something. “We’ve… never spoken frankly about her.”

_Her._

“So?”

“So I know you were close with her.” His voice is far-away, detached—removed from the situation altogether. It sounds strange through the rush of blood pulsing at her ears. “You knew Jane best.” 

Hermione doesn't know how to have this conversation with him. She suddenly feels more fragile than she’s ever felt. A sagging cloth doll. A leaf ready to crumble at the slightest pressure.

Something in her brain’s clicked off.

Silent tears unexpectedly stream down her face. She swallows harsh, shaky breaths, not realizing how tightly she’s clasping her glass until it shatters in her palm.

She yelps at the sudden stinging pain. Blood streams thin and scarlet through the line of her palm and down her arm, dripping from her elbow.

“Let me see,” says Tom tersely, taking her wounded finger. To her horror, he puts the finger in his mouth, lewdly sucking and licking the blood off.

“What’re you—”

“Disinfecting.” He licks along her palm next, and at her teeny wrist his mouth is large enough to swallow her flesh whole. He traces slow, deliberate kisses along her nimble arm until he’s sopped all the blood with his tongue, then he slips an arm around her waist, crashing his mouth over hers, as if it's the only way he can think to make this better.

His breath is hot and wet and filthy and her heart stutters, nearly stops. She tastes the salt of blood.

Her wet lashes brush his cheek. She blinks, _quickquickquick_, trying to stop the tears, mind racing thousand miles a second. Her first thought is _‘why is my brother kissing me?’. _Second is _‘I don’t want him to stop’_. There are no thoughts after that.

"Oh," her voice is strained, something between a whimper and plea, fingers urgently gripping his shoulders.

In the next heartbeat she kisses back, drinking his bloodied lips with her own. His tongue slips past her teeth to touch the tip of hers, and she breathes a sharp exhale, feeling an electric thrill as if she's touched a live wire.

Tom pulls back, his full lips smeared crimson of her essence. He stares at her tear-stained face, reads the _need_ on it, smug victory in the slow arch of his eyebrows. 

Before she can object, he’s scooped her off the floor and into his arms, dragging her to his bedroom like she’s a newly-wed sack of potatoes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed Hermione's POV. Before anyone says it: no she's not a psychopath. I know there are some very stark themes and implications in this chapter but they're important for character context. 
> 
> (I know I'm behind on review responses. Been on a manic writing spree to get this chapter out. Want to say I appreciate and reread every single one a million times and I'm gonna respond to them in great detail soon!)


	11. Chapter 11

His sister_—_a frigid bitch_—_is impressive for her seventeen years of consistency. If there's such a thing as a perfect alibi; it's the one that keeps you at distance for plausible deniability. The one person Tom can rely on to think ten steps ahead, both to guard him and guard _against_ him_—_it is Hermione. 

His sister is a monolith. 

And like all monoliths, she crumbles eventually.

Full on her startled lips he's kissing her. With a theatrical bloodiness, with increasing pressure, and with his skillful tongue. Tom tastes her helplessness, savors the sinking yielding, the surging tide of warmth that makes her limp in his arms. Makes her grab at him desperately, arms around his neck, the way couples do in black-and-white movies.

He studied that scene in _Casablanca _in great detail. 

"Don't drop me," comes the drunken hiccup at his lips.

Tom kicks the door shut behind them. "Don't talk," he warns. "Say nothing at all." Tentatively half-mast he distrusts her mouth, knowing how good she is at killing his erection within seconds of provoking it. The kiss went well but this moment may not last without strategic manuevering. A match he can easily lose. He's had seconds to prepare. Timer is ticking. Gloves are on. Knickers must come off. Any other bitch would not require more than bare minimum effort, but his sister has seen him at every turn of life, knows his every trick. His sister is a shrew. She's peering around his room, and he can feel her judging the lack of dirty laundry, the fresh sheets, the vacuumed carpet, the lamp at bedside that makes shadows fall over the sharp planes of his face _just_ _right_.

Wasting no time, he drops her ceremoniously on his duvet, and drapes himself over her body, settling his weight like a warm, heavy coat. He opens her blouse, expertly twisting each button with his thumb and third finger, then running his finger along her breastbone. When her shirt falls open, he efficiently yanks it, tosses it aside. She scrambles to cover herself with her hands.

"Give a girl a warning next time," she says, pink-faced and clearly out of her element.

"No thanks." He leans on his elbows, eyes having their fill. Her arms are soft and untoned. Her waist is less pronounced than a porn girl's. Her ribs are as thin as candy canes. The spread of her trembling hips is like a vase. His eyes flit back to the breasts.

He wants to see more.

Wrangling her shielding hands away— ("I said give a _warning_," she says.) ("I'm giving it _now_," he says.)— he unclasps her peachy, utilitarian, far too modest bra, wrenching it off.

Her breasts.

He can't tear his eyes away. 

Dainty. Pert. Big enough to be squeezed and felt, but not the hanging, bouncy mess of <strike>omit</strike> large breasts unnerve Tom, make him feel childish, like he'll be smothered by <strike>omit the thought focus on</strike> Hermione, his sister Hermione who loves him and hates him all in the same breath is appealing to look at in ways other women are not. Soft, pink areolas encircle the coral colored dot of each partly erected nipple. A teardrop of pale skin, beckoning his hand to mold.

He takes one, savoring the permanence of flesh. Such soft, meager skin. His sister, pink and looking shy, gives a little squeak. His fingers knead inwardly, tempting himself with the notion of pinching at that tiny nub. He smirks at her soft, girlish moan, enjoying the way her flesh fills up his groping digits. His palm opens, and she squirms like a worm beneath him at being given the full feel of his rough, well worn fingers sliding into place, truly feeling—exploring.

She _shudders_, rolling her head back, baring her throat, and Tom wants to _take_. He leans in, bites a smooth pale collarbone, roves his tongue over her salty flesh in one long, wet swipe. He groans. Feels her hips buck. Licks again. _Again_. Slides his tongue up to the teeny point of her chin, latching her open mouth, tasting the inside. So, so _good_. Their tongues touch and he swallows the little plush moan she gives him when he twists her nub. Tom wants to eat every little sound from her mouth. He wants to wrangle thin, furious limbs down and mercilessly fuck his pink, wet, whimpering sister into sex-soaked sheets. The fantasy has his heart racing. 

He may have voiced it out loud, because he hears a '_Tom!'_ A reproachful palm smacks his head. 

Hair tousled over forehead, he pulls back with a panting laugh. He stares in her torso, flushed and naked, his eyes gleaming with triumph, and sees the contrast in her ferocious glare. 

It makes him angry too. 

He grabs her tits, not breaking eye-contact. Squeezes them in his palms. "I can't believe you've kept these from me all these years," he says acidly.

It provokes. Her expression morphs from anger to outrage. "You sick _pervert_—" Another hard smack is delivered to the back of his head. Tom grunts, lifting his head slightly to find the next swipe of her palm go _hard_ across his cheek. He clasps at the burning sting of flesh, in bewildered amazement. 

His sister, a cruel bitch. 

"What's wrong with you?" he barks, fingers catching her wrist at the _fourth_ swipe aimed at him. 

"What's wrong with _you?_" she snarls back, more ferocious. "You complete fucking _psychopath_—"

He glares, pressing her palm to the bed, holding her down and angling himself over her. At the sight of him wetting his lips, her expression morphs.

"Going to fuck you," he says—cold, blunt, matter-of-fact. "You've given me headaches for years. I've had it...I deserve this." 

The next second he _hurls_ at her. Hermione gives a yelp, her hand at the side table shoving, crashing his lamp to the floor. Darkness falls over the room, and in the dark there is nothing but twisting, and the sound of fabric on skin as his limbs slide across hers in a restless assertion for dominance. His sister fights back, of course she does, pulls at his hair and pushes at his face. When he won’t quit, she bites into his shoulder, hard, _painful_. Cumulatively her bites unlock him, enrage him until he’s forcing her head back. His wet lips violate her neck, once, twice. This is a silent, wordless argument between brother and sister, merciless grabbing and groping and shoving, biting throat and lips—

A kiss, _another_ kiss. Her fluttering breath comes to sharp, halting rasp. This kiss is not nice; it is asphyxiation. Tom wrangles her fighting arms and pins them to the mattress, his snarling mouth pressing hers into the pillows. He kisses like he wants to wound her, like he wants to _strangle_ her, like she is a vessel for the storm roiling in him, an orifice for outpouring rage. He is used to _taking_. He will _not_ be denied.

Her arms swing as if she’s sinking into the mattress, sinking underwater, making a desperate grab at his shoulders, pulling at his face and his hair.

She finally tears his lips away, both of them panting for oxygen in the hair breadth’s space between. Tom stares at Hermione. Her eyes are full of panic. Her mouth is red, swollen, bruised. He wants to taste her again. He jerks in for another kiss, and she grabs him by the hair. 

“Stop it.” She tugs him down to her chest. Panting harshly, his nose buries against one breast. He exhales, feeling the heave of her expanding ribs. He feels it—she has an instance of fear—he doesn't hear it but he feels a bleat as her lips press against his forehead. Then she breaths—he feels her body move as her mouth opens on him—she takes a breath and lets herself go tumbling. "Tom," she laughs, trying not to sob. "It's me, Tom.” He feels a kiss at his forehead, then another, another. “It’s Hermione. I love you, Tom, _stop."_

Her voice has changed. It’s not a sister.

It's a medical professional.

Slinking fingers through his hair, her fingertips trace slow soothing circles at his scalp. He groans against her and feels her stomach clench. "Hermione..." he murmurs, eyes clasping shut. Why are her hands so soft? Brushing stray tendrils off his forehead, she is busy whispering things at his ear. Things he doesn't like. Things like, _'I'm not that attractive, Tom.' _ or_ 'I’m too old for you.'_ or_ 'I don’t have much experience.'_ or _'My head’s all messed up—You’d never enjoy sex with me, you know.'_

Crass tactic. His sister is trying to dissuade him by painting herself as damaged goods.

It won't work. 

He kisses at her nipple, an angry, teethy, ungrown kiss that makes her shiver. “Let me find out myself,” his voice is low and hoarse, annoyed. “Please.” 

Hermione takes his hands in hers, rubs at the weathered callouses inside. She presses a kiss into each palm and rests them on her shoulders. 

"Okay," she whispers, laying down for him, placid and calm. "But no hurting each other. Promise?" 

His fingers play with the hem of her skirt.

"Promise."

Gripping the elastic at her hips, he yanks it to her knees. 

He freezes. Stares. 

Strawberry-colored marks stretch across her upper thighs. They look like tribal marks. Barbaric. Too many span her skin, faded and pink, the most visible one stretching from her inner thigh to an inch above her left hip. His eyes scan flesh they have never seen before. _Adornments,_ he deems, because he can't process the other word. Not fresh but hard to look at. Porn did not prepare Tom for this. Bodies look stupid perfect in porn. Porn girls are stupid and loud but they are always willing to indulge male fantasies. The marks on Hermione's thighs tell a different story. He's suddenly feeling very sick. He needs to pull his eyes away, go back to her face and breasts, focus on his arousal. His breaths become shallow and his vision shakes. His nails digs into his palm and he swallows thickly. <strike>He's going to throw up</strike>. He can't let his eyes linger on those marks <strike>or he'll throw up he's going to</strike>

Inhaling and exhaling unsteadily, he sits up. He needs to keep breathing. He needs a cigarette. He needs his pills. Breath, he tells himself. Just breathe. In. Out. In. Stop and breathe and breathe and don't stop breathing _don't you fucking stop._

Hermione watches him. A blip of hurt passes in her eyes, but it's gone before he can pick it apart.

"Changed your mind?" she says. "I'm that ugly?"

"Shut up," he gasps unsteadily. He holds her chin and turns her head so that her cheek is flat against the pillow; he doesn't want to look at her eyes. "I'm taking my time." 

"That doesn't sound like you at all." 

Warm only a moment before, warm against his sister’s naked body, warm and so, so eager to fuck her—Now there’s a raw, ice-cold _pull_ in Tom’s chest, a sinking he does not understand. 

"I'm..." He swallows, trying to fight a sudden bout of vertigo. He lifts his head, dazed eyes beating into the headboard. "not feeling well."

Understatement. He's having a panic attack. 

"It's the bruises isn't it? They're ancient. Viktor doesn't mind them but if you do, that's fine. I don't care... I hate you anyway." 

Love to hate in seconds. His sister is prickly like a porcupine. She makes herself so impossible to touch even when that's all she wants him to do. But Tom's known this for years. 

"I don't mind the scars." Almost vindictively, he flicks his finger across her nipple. She gives a soft, plush whimper and he files the sound in a tiny little slot in his mind. He will revisit it another night. "I wasn't going to bring them up." 

"You can ask if you want."

Tom looks at her face again and she stares somewhere beyond his ear, into the distance.

His throat feels pigeon-hole thin.

He swallows hard. With a hoarse laugh, he says, "Really?"

She shrugs her shoulders, like she doesn't have a damn in the world to give, not in front of him. 

"Tell me," he demands, lacking the hardness when he issues inviolable commands. "You're meant to tell me these things. I have a right to know."

"Why? So I could have you _pretend__?" _

"I..."

"Because I think you can fake giving a damn about me for an hour, maybe two...at best," she says viciously, still staring somewhere beyond him. "Just long enough to get your rocks off, I imagine."

Forget Gellert. His sister's gone for the jugular. She's going to murder Tom herself, and she's going to do it while he's still erect. 

"Hermione," Tom hisses, an edge coming to his voice. "I'm not playing games. Tell me the fuck who."

Finally the veneer breaks, and her face crumples. She twists her neck, rapidly blinking, trying to hide the flurry of tears.

"Your dad," she whispers, at last. 

There is a deep pit in Tom's chest and it’s yawning wide and hollow. In a second it’s going to swallow him and he can’t let Hermione see that. 

He jumps off the bed and races to the bathroom. 

He's going to puke. 

Hatred claws at his throat. He tries to force out the venomous bile. Doesn't work. He has not eaten enough to produce vomit. There is nothing inside he can expel. He is a hollow man, as empty as a balloon. His stomach keeps on contracting violently, trying to force out _something._ He keeps hoping for something. But nothing comes. His shoulders are shaking. The flesh of his face feels cold and clammy. He's lurched in front of the toilet seat. Nothing's happening. Nothing's coming out, his father's DNA he cannot expel. 

His sister has given him an alka seltzer tablet and a glass of water. She leans with knees to bathroom tile, rubbing comforting circles at his back. She is whispering soothing things, she is being wonderful, and it slices like hemming pins into Tom's skull. _It was so long ago, it's okay, I love you, I'm fine, I love you, I don't want you to worry, I love you. _It's all the same things he has heard many times and it does not undo the damage done. Her hovering presence should irritate and infuriate him, and it doesn't. No one will blame her for cutting him out of her life, and still she hasn't. He knows she won't, even if he asks. 

"Tell me I killed him."

"Tom—"

"Tell me," he snarls, the push of acid at his throat. "Tell me it was _me." _His memory's shrouded but Tom knows it has to be one of them; it's the only way their life makes sense.

"It was you," she whispers, and Tom feels a wash of relief, a strange sense of rightness come over him. "Sorry... I wouldn't have let this happen if I'd known how you were going to react." 

His sister underestimates his ability to react to things. Tom can react very well to things. He may not have the full set of crayons but disgust, anger, fury, wrath, and suicidal ideation he is more than capable of experiencing. 

"Tell me it was a merciless death. That I made him suffer. I made him hurt."

"You did," she affirms, though her brow is pursed in discomfort. "I think your dad was hurt, in whatever way that he was able to hurt."

Though she has put the skirt back on, her front is still nude. Tom can't look at her breasts anymore, so he glances up at her eyes. But he can't look there either, he can't look anywhere without thinking about his father, he cannot fuck her without wanting to shoot his brains out, so he cannot fuck her ever at all. A tarnished hope. Tainted. Ruined. Over. The end. 

His shoulders are still shaking. "I should have killed him sooner."

"Stop it."

"The day he married Jane. I should have slit their throats in their sleep. You and I could have run away."

Her mouth curves to a pained smile. "Like fugitives. That's a terrible plan."

"It's a flawless plan," Tom grunts, feeling irrationally heated. 

She looks at him, then scoots and kisses his cheek. She stands, plants another kiss to the tip-top of his head, and goes to sit on the edge of the bed. She draws on her shirt and sighs, "I'm sorry this has turned into such a morbid night. More morbid than usual I mean."

_More morbid than usual._ What an achievement. And somehow it's still not the worst night of their lives. 

Certain nothing's going to wallop out of his stomach, Tom decides to give his knees some rest. He stands, swishes mouthwash with aggression, and returns to bed. Leaning at the headboard, he glowers while Hermione ignores him for her phone. 

"Shit," she says, flicking a finger over the screen. "I have to go—Viktor's in a bad mood tonight. Just got back from dinner with his parents and he's pissed about some function they're making him attend next week. Some networking event...I should go make sure he's all right..."

Tom knows his sister must go back to Krum, return to boring, pragmatic life. He can't keep her here. He also can't keep from feeling outraged at everything and everyone.

"Krum should learn to be more independent," he fumes. "You've got yourself to focus on. He's a goddamned grown man."

"You're one to talk."

"What does that mean?" he snaps.

"It means—go the hell to sleep Tom." She stands, throwing his jacket at his face. "Mind your business. I'll call to check up on you tomorrow."

He watches her trek for the door.

She pauses, hand at knob.

He hears a sigh. One of defeat. 

With a dash she returns, falls to his bedside. Cupping his face, she murmurs, in apology, "Last time, promise." And presses a firm, full kiss to his scowling lips, rapid like the trill of dragonfly wings. 

Tom closes his eyes, exhales into her mouth. He kisses, returns what he receives. His arms curl her body, holding her rigid and tight. Her lips are warm. It's cold in his room. He breaths again. He kisses trying to warm the chill in his chest, but it doesn't warm.

When they break apart, she's looking down and Tom's staring at the top of her head. 

"Thanks," she whispers. 

"Glad to help you get it out of your system," he says blandly, blowing on her curls. 

He reaches for the pills in his drawer.

Now Tom will take his pills without argument. He will take these pills, for as long as he lives. Without the pills Tom is no better than his father. Without the pills there is no stopping point, and without a stopping point, there is no hope. 

"Thanks for not making me feel bad about the scars," Hermione says, intensely staring down the duvet. "It was strangely brotherly, which is probably accidental on your part, because I know you're a bastard, but it still feels nice. Makes me feel...not alone."

Tom has no clue what he's done. In fact he's starting to think he's never done anything at all, nothing that's ever meant anything, except for killing his father. He can't have this conversation. He's not himself—he's bitter and scattered and defenseless.

So he says, what he knows to be an inviolable truth, "I'd kill for you, Hermione." Then adds. "Without hesitation." 

She looks up. Smiles sadly. Her eyes say _you already have._


	13. note

Sorry this is not an update! Apologies for the delay. Med school is slaughtering my soul a la Tom Riddle style. Once I get this work-life balance thing sorted, I'mma hammer out the rest of the updates. I will try to make them longer. I forsee this being 120k in total. Rest assured this fic will not get abandoned, it's just on the back burner until the author improves her study-nerd levels. Gimme a month or two. 

Thanks for all the lovely reviews so far.

Our boyski shall be back veeeery soon to kill people, continue his existential crisis, fight with his gay supervillainous best friend, try his hand at parenting babby!Harry, juggle a jilted ex-girlfriend, occasionally go to his day job, hate-lust(love?) after his sister, solve family mysteries, evade the police, maintain the usual bastard shenanigans, and figure out just how he fits into the modern world. Hopefully, eventually, there'll be a chapter that doesn't end in a failed boner. Given Tom's terrible record - we can only hope. 


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